Bookishness and Australian Literature

Abstract

The terms and tropes associated with books provide essential data for a properly grounded historical phenomenology of reading; at the same time they reflect laterally on some of the broader patterns within the cultures in which they occur. The traditional analogies of"books as friends" and "books as furniture," for example, are nicely succinct epitomes of two very different but equally persistent forms of investment in books-effective and financial investment-which have been deeply characteristic of Anglo-American cultures since the beginning of the nineteenth century.1 Their embedded familiarity and complexity are, if anything, the more clearly demonstrated by their ironic reversibility: books as the friends you never have to invite over, and books as the intellectual furniture of a well-stocked mind.2 Even ostensibly simple and straightforward terms from this same paradigm-a term like "bookish," for example-can turn out, upon closer examination, to be less straightforward and perspicuous than they look.