Review of Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s–1960s, edited by Robert Dixon and Veronica Kelly

Abstract

Contradictions are embraced in Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s–1960s, a collection of essays that charts the cultural climate of early to mid-twentieth-century Australia. The editors, Robert Dixon and Veronica Kelly, fulil their aim of representing the dynamism and diversity of Australia’s complex relationship with modernity, and of contesting approaches based on aesthetic hierarchies. As such, this volume provides rich context for the changing narrative of modernism in Australia, and for consideration of ideas about modernity in general. There is a focus on the energy and innovation of Australian involvement in a transnational process and, at times, a vigorous questioning of the operations of modernism.