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Paul Eggert

Martin J. Svaglic Professor Emeritus

Education

  • BA (Sydney)
  • MA (Melbourne)
  • PhD (Kent at Canterbury) 
    • Five years teaching at La Trobe University in Melbourne.
    • Thirty years at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. There he served as founding director of the Australian Scholarly Editions Centre (1993–2005), as head of the English department (2001–03) and, for his last five years until the end of 2014, was an Australian Research Council professorial fellow.

Research Interests

  • Theories of the Literary Work, Text and Document
  • Scholarly Editing in its Print and Digital Forms
  • D. H Lawrence and Joseph Conrad. 
  • Current research project: the Charles Harpur Critical Archive, examining the works of this Romantic-era poet of colonial New South Wales. Publication of the archival expression of the project occurred in October 2018. The editorial expression will follow.

Publications/Research Listings

  • How D. H. Lawrence Wrote: Performance on the Page, forthcoming. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.
  • The Letters of Charles Harpur and his Circle: The Supplementary Letters. Edited by Paul Eggert and Chris Vening. forthcoming Canberra: Charles Harpur Critical Archive, 2025.
  • The Letters of Charles Harpur and his Circle. Selected and edited by Paul Eggert and Chris Vening. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2023. 
  • The Prose of Charles Harpur. Selected and edited by Paul Eggert and Chris Vening. Under contract to Sydney University Press.
  • Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature (Cambridge UP, 2009); it won the Society for Textual Scholarship’s Finneran Award for 2009–10.
  • Biography of a Book: Henry Lawson’s While the Billy Boils (Pennsylvania State UP, 2013, and Sydney UP, 2013)
  •  Full-scale scholarly editions of (1) Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad, co-edited with Roger Osborne (Cambridge UP, 2013 in the Works of Joseph Conrad series) and (2) the original newspaper versions of Henry Lawson’s short stories While the Billy Boils (Sydney UP, 2013).
  • Several other full-scale scholarly editions of works by D. H. Lawrence, Henry Kingsley and Rolf Boldrewood have appeared under Paul’s hand since 1990. He has also edited several collections of essays (on D. H. Lawrence, book history and editorial theory), and has written many journal articles and book chapters.
  • An essay available online is Paul’s 2013 presidential address to the Society for Textual Scholarship entitled “The Hand of the Present,” in Textual Cultures.
  • Another is his D. F. McKenzie lecture, “Brought to Book: Book History and the Idea of Literature,” delivered at the University of Oxford, England and published in The Library. 
  • Finally, an article about what the printed (analogue) scholarly edition has to teach the digital, and vice versa, appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities in 2016.

Awards

  • Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998.
  • Founding General Editor of its Academy Editions of Australian Literature series (10 vols, 1996–2007).
  • Chair of its English section (2009–11).
  • Centenary Medal of the Commonwealth of Australia for services to the study of literature in 2003.