Antipodean Encounters: Australia and the German Literary Imagination, 1754-1918

This is the first comprehensive documentation and critical appraisal of the fascinating range of German literary responses to the Fifth Continent prior to colonisation and to watersheds in Australia’s social history during the first 130 years of white settlement. The literature surveyed encompasses emigration handbooks, diaries, travelogues, exotic romance, adventure narratives, juvenile fiction and utopian extravaganzas, as well as a modest corpus of devotional, lyric and polemic verse in anthologies, German-Australian newspaper feuilletons and prisoner-of-war weeklies. Featuring among the better known authors are Therese Huber, Amalie Schoppe, Friedrich Gerstaecker, Sophie Woerishoeffer, Friedrich Mader and Paul Scheerbart. But equal prominence is given to versatile ‘migrant’ writers such as Theodor Mueller and Stefan von Kotze.