Abstract
My Brilliant Career (1901) is the story of a young woman growing up in the outback who yearns to be an author. The novel has an iconic status in Australian literature and the success of Brilliant Career enabled its author to finance Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the annual Miles Franklin award. Yet as any reader knows, the title is deeply ironic; it is used in the novel to describe the exhausting farm labor that Sybylla endures for much of her childhood in rural New South Wales and that makes her dream of a literary career seem remote.
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Notes
Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1966), 21.
Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 224–275.
Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978).
William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1954).
Philip Hardie and Helen Moore, eds., Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Patrick Cheney, ‘Introduction: “Jog on, jog on,” European career paths’, in European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, edited by Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas (Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 3.
On literary celebrity, see, for instance, Loren Glass, Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (New York: New York University Press, 2004);
Faye Hammill, Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007);
Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
Joe Moran, Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America (London: Pluto, 2000).
Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 61.
Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 227.
André Gide, in D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1.
Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1901), 1.
Gary Lee Stonum, Faulkner’s Career: An Internal Literary History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 16.
Michael Benton, Literary Biography: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
A recent work of queer literary analysis suggests the centrality of the ‘career’ for the early twentieth-century understanding of non-normative sexu-alities such as homosexuality and celibacy: see Benjamin Kahan, Celibacies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 34–36. On the erotics of career for women writing in this period,
see also Kathryn R. Kent, Making Girls into Women: American Women’s Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
One notable exception is Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them (London: Routledge, 2004).
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© 2015 Guy Davidson and Nicola Evans
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Davidson, G., Evans, N. (2015). Introduction: Brilliant Careers?. In: Davidson, G., Evans, N. (eds) Literary Careers in the Modern Era. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478504_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478504_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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