Imperial Minerals
Illustration Gold mining on an Australian goldfield

Imperial Minerals

Mineral Extraction in the Anglophone Literary Cultures of the British Southern Settler Colonies, 1842-1910

Research Challenges

New Reading Methods:

Challenging periodicity, canonicity, genre, and form

SEE WORK PACKAGE 2

New Readers and Writers:

Challenging the boundaries of nineteenth-century studies’ texts, counter-texts, and audiences

SEE WORK PACKAGE 3

New Reading Geographies:

Challenging imperial, political, national, and racial literary identities

SEE WORK PACKAGE 4

The wiki has now launched

The Literary Mines Wiki is now available to browse! Texts in the database are categorised according to their different commodity, labour, and infrastructure regimes; their geographical locations; literary genres and forms; as well as the extractive stages they represent. The wiki-style will allow people outside of the project team to contribute to the ongoing discovery of texts and archival records of extraction. The project team will be developing training videos and manuals to help you make your contributions to the database.


Literarymines.ie

Work Packages

Work Package 1

Reading and Writing Mineral Extraction

Work Package 2

Mineral Regimes

Work Package 3

Labour Regimes

Work Package 4

Infrastructure Regimes

Latest Updates

Golden Cloud: Digital Edition of Atha Westbury’s Colonial Fairy Tale for Children

September 11, 2023
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Gothic Gold Mining: Psychological Horror in ‘A Hunt for a Gold Mine’

October 27, 2023
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Ghosts of a Solitary Soul in Australia’s Mining Fields: Henry Congreve’s ‘The Ghostly Digger’ (1880)

October 31, 2023
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Santas of the Southern Cross: Henry Lawson’s ‘The Ghosts of Many Christmases’ (1902)

January 5, 2024
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Fishing for Gold in the Nautical Gothic

July 24, 2024
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Writing from Below: Petitions by Chinese Indentured Laborers in the South African Mines

September 20, 2024
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‘In Search of Gold’: A Trip to the Archives

September 23, 2024
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IMAGE SOURCES

Homepage title image: ‘Goldgewinnung auf einem australischen Goldfeld [Gold mining on an Australian goldfield] [1858/9]’ by Herman Deutsch. Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.

Work Package 1:  ‘Diggers of High Degree’ (1852) by S. T. Gill. Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.   Work Package 2: ‘Leading from Stocks to Paxton’s Lode’ (1847) by S. T. Gill. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia Work Package 3: ‘Zealous Gold Diggers’ (1852) by S. T. Gill. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia. Work Package 4: ‘Port Phillip Gold Mining Company’s Claim and the Township of Clunes’ (1869) by Samuel Calvert. Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria