One of the grand traditions of the Past & Present Reading Group is “the pitch.” As we near the end of our current text, those who have engaged with it are given the opportunity to nominate the next book that the group will tackle. At risk of doing an injustice to any selfless members of the [...]
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The Australian literary firmament recently lost a giant when David Ireland passed away at the age of 94. Ireland’s literary career, spanning the best part of fifty years, can essentially be broken into two halves. From his literary breakout in 1968 to the early 1980s, Ireland was very much the [...]
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The Red Taylorist: The Life and Times of Walter Nicholas Polakov is the culmination of years of archival research tracing the story of this Polakov, a Russian radical who immigrated to the United States in 1906. Throughout the course of the book, Kelly unfolds in wonderful detail the various [...]
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The Department of Political Economy and The Novel Network, both at the University of Sydney, co-hosted a roundtable focus on Space, Place and Capitalism: The Literary Geographies of The Unknown Industrial Prisoner by Brett Heino, which represents the first time that a literary economy approach [...]
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When Rowan Cahill first asked whether I would be interested in reading and reviewing his and Terry Irving’s The Barber Who Read History: Essays in Radical History, I signed on without hesitation. Almost immediately, a series of questions passed through my head that will be instantly [...]
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In a previous post on Progress in Political Economy, I discussed how David Ireland’s Miles Franklin prize-winning novel The Unknown Industrial Prisoner is particularly relevant for an analysis at the crossroads of political economy, radical geography and literary theory. In that same piece I [...]
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One of the most special moments you can have as a scholar is for a particular project to irresistibly place itself at the centre of your attention. You think about it, obsess about it, lose sleep over it, sure in the knowledge that you must pursue it wherever it may lead. I was lucky enough [...]
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The United States of America currently lies stricken in multi-faceted economic, political and social crisis. More than 100,000 Americans have been killed by COVID-19 in a once-in-a-century pandemic. Unemployment has sky-rocketed, with over twenty million people now out of work. Widespread [...]
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