David Carter is a professor of Australian literature and cultural history at the University of Queensland.Roger Osborne is a lecturer in English and writing at James Cook University.

• List of figuresList of platesAcknowledgementsIntroduction: the two-sided triangle1. Antipodean romance: Australian fiction and the American book trade in the 19th century2. International reputations and transatlantic rights: Rosa Praed and Louis Becke3. Crime, sensation and the modern genre system: Australian authors in the popular fiction marketplace, 1820s–1920s4. Renegotiating the American connection: Australian fiction 1900–1930s5. Mystery and romance: the market for light fiction between the wars6. Becoming articulate: Henry Handel Richardson and Katharine Susannah Prichard7. ‘Australia is very American’: Australian historical fiction in America 1920s–1940s8. ‘Australian moderns’: Christina Stead and Patrick White in New York9. Bestsellers, modest sellers and commercial failures: the postwar yearsEpilogue: completing the triangleWorks citedIndex

‘This account of American publishing serves as a parallel literary history: of fiction that has become part of our literary canon, and of popular writing that has disappeared from memory. Carter and Osborne quote numerous published reviews and private comments by American publishers that reinforce a sense of the openness, sophistication and perceptiveness of these literary Americans. They place Australian writing in the context of the international development of the novel rather than the conventional local interest in Australianness.’