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The globalisation and consolidation of book publishing is widely seen as having negative consequences for Australian literature. Some commentators argue that this shift is detrimental to Australian literature as a whole; others identify the growth of multinational publishing conglomerates with a specific decline in Australian literary fiction. This article explores both positions, first identifying and investigating trends in Australian novel publication and comparing these to trends in the publication of novels from other countries as well as other Australian-originated literature (specifically, poetry and auto/biography). It then considers the specific case of Australian literary fiction, before looking in detail at the output of large publishers of Australian novels. This analysis reveals a recent decline in Australian novel and poetry titles, but offers a more complex picture of this trend than dominant expressions of nostalgia and alarm about the fate of Australian literature and publishing would suggest.

Two and a half decades ago in this journal Elizabeth Morrison made an impassioned and persuasive case for creating an index to serial fiction in Australian (or Australasian) newspapers. 1 Such an index, she argued, would reveal much about the connections between British, Australian, American and New Zealand literary cultures, and specifically, the influence of these other national literary cultures on Australia's. Indexes of fiction in specific Australian newspapers and magazines had been created prior to Morrison's article, as she acknowledged, and others have been published since, all making important contributions to our understanding of literary and print culture. 2 While this large number of projectsover more than four decades-indicates the desirability of Morrison's agenda, their history and current state foregrounds what have been major obstacles to achieving this aim. The most obvious of these-demonstrated by the two methods Morrison employed to sketch out the index's parameters-is the formidable scale of the task. To understand its breadth, Morrison performed a "cross-sectional check" to explore which of Victoria's one hundred or so newspapers, "issued on or about 31 August 1889, contained instalments of novels." This method uncovered twenty-eight separate novels-some published multiple times-as well as a pattern of independent publication in metropolitan dailies and weeklies, and syndicated publication in suburban and country newspapers. The second method, to explore the index's depth, involved "a diachronic study of serials in the Age from April 1872 (when it began to serialise fiction) until the end of the century," and

Dale deserves special thanks: as has been the case since I was a graduate student, for this book she has been my most dedicated and encouraging reader. I would also like to acknowledge Elizabeth Morrison, who was a generous reader of parts of the book and an inspiration to me while writing it. In the late 1980s, Elizabeth imagined the possibilities of an index of fiction in Australian newspapers and proposed it be held in a "computer database." In building that database and exploring that fiction I have tried to emulate the nuance and scholarly rigor of Elizabeth's work, as well as its ambitious scope. This book would not have been possible without a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council. That funding enabled me to hire bibliographer Carol Hetherington. This was surely the single greatest contributor to the success of the project. I approached Carol asking for advice about whom I might hire as a research assistant; when Carol suggested herself for the job I gained a colleague and friend to share the project with. Junran Lei, development officer in the Centre for Digital Humanities Research at the Australian National University, gave invaluable technical assistance to the project. Work on this book vi • Acknowledgments was also supported by research travel funding from the Australian National University and by a Bicentennial Fellowship from the Menzies Centre at King's College London. While I was at King's Mark Turner kindly introduced me to a group of periodical scholars, including Laurel Brake, James Mussell, Matthew Philpotts, and Matthew Rubery. My conversations with these scholars were instrumental in shaping the book's arguments.Chapter 1 is closely based on an article published in Modern Language Quarterly in 2017, which also outlines ideas I develop in chapter 2. A version of the first part of chapter 4 was published in Book History in 2016, and much of an earlier version of chapter 5 appeared in Victorian Periodicals Review in 2017. I thank the editors of these journals, particularly Marshall Brown and Alexis Easley, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for helping me to develop this work.Finally, I want to thank my family. As always, my parents and sisters provided enormous support and encouragement. I also benefited a great deal from conversations with my mathematician brother, Michael Bode, about digital methods, and from his practical assistance with creating the decision trees used in chapter 6. My husband, Ben, and I had two children during the writing of this book-Elsa and Felix-and it is dedicated to them, and to Ben, whose understanding and support, and "actual sharing of the fatigues of the nursery" (#21693/IV), made this book possible. Contents •••Introduction: Questions and Opportunities for Twenty-First-Century Literary History these digitized newspapers to automatically identify and harvest fiction. On this basis, I discovered over 16,500 works, a massively expanded record of nineteenth-century Australian literary culture and its connections with the international circulation o...