Smith, RussellRooney, Monique2022-02-241833-6027http://hdl.handle.net/1885/261529The essays collected in this special edition of JASAL were originally presented at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, held at the Australian National University, Canberra, in July 2009, convened by Julieanne Lamond, Lucy Neave, Monique Rooney and Russell Smith. The theme of the conference, 'Common Readers and Cultural Critics', aimed to explore the relationship between critical reading, as practiced in educational institutions or as performed in specialised journals, and the broad diversity of reading publics. In particular, the conference called for participants to reflect on the way in which literary cultures are characterised by tensions between various kinds of specialised elites and broader collective processes of discernment, appreciation and canonisation, between reading privately and reading professionally, reading for knowledge and reading for pleasure.application/pdfen-AU© 2010 Association for the Study of Australian LiteratureIntroduction: Common Readers and Cultural Critics20102020-12-13