Critical Attention to Australian Novelists in Newspapers, 1950 to 2006

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This dataset shows these results, from 1950 to 2006, for 'works about' published in, respectively, newspapers and academic journals. Identification of publications as newspapers or academic (peer-reviewed) journals was done manually. (NOTE: regarding academic publications, titles were categorised retrospectively, based on whether they were peer-reviewed in 2007.) As discussed in Reading by Numbers, the capacity of this dataset to indicate critical attention to Australian novelists is inhibited by the original search parameters used. We defined an 'Australian novelist' as anyone who had written at least one 'Australian novel'. As a result, certain authors – such as David Williamson, Dorothy Hewett, Judith Wright and Les Murray – appear near the top of the critical rankings. However, this position arises from discussion of their poetry or plays, not their novels. In an effort to improve the capacity of the data to indicate authors known as novelists, we removed from the results all authors with only one novel: it is those modified results that appear here. For the purpose of my analysis in Reading by Numbers, this modification created another problem: namely, although I knew from our original analysis of the data that Helen Darville/Demidenko had received a large amount of critical attention (relating to her novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper) she was no longer included in the results. To avoid missing this author, when analysing the results for critical attention to Australian novelists, I manually counted the 'works about' Darville/Demidenko (overall, in newspapers and academic journals) to include her in the rankings for these different categories.

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