Modernism

'The roman à clef dangerously teased the conventions of realism, flaunting its elitism and the need for a knowing reader. As a genre, it seemed…

In this essay I want to use Riders in the Chariot to suggest another way of reading the politics of White's modernism. The world of…

Discusses a collection of little magazines published in the interwar period that 'show a sudden--if delayed--moment of accession to contemporary debates about modernity and the…

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…

Whereas the negative early criticism of Tourmaline (1963) found cogent, if belated rebuttal in the articles of A.D. Hope and Helen Tiffin that appeared ten…

In the post-war period, the dichotomy between Realism and Modernism seemed to summarise all the important rivalries in Australian fiction — nationalist enthusiasm and political…

'This article locates the Jindyworobak movement in relation to late global modernism and reads the Jindyworobaks as what I term "provincial modernists". While the Jindyworobak…

Argues that Rodriguez's poetry is defined by a 'double debt: both to Romanticism's prophetic, empowered rhetoric, and to Modernism's growing doubts about the limits and…

During the past forty years or so in Australia a notable high culture has been created which for all its diversity is both recognizably national…

When Martin Duwell asked John Tranter about how he would describe his books' concerns thematically. Tranter replied that while it was possible to treat his…

Explores the poetic politics behind the Ern Malley affair and its rivalling groups (Sydney vs Melbourne/Adelaide) and investigates “the fabric of differences and unacknowledged similarities…

This splendidly presented double issue of the journal Helix has a fittingly double character. At its heart is some fascinating documentation of the 'Melbourne Vortex'…

Tranter's work has consistently engaged problems of deixis (grammatical orientation) and interpretation which, in turn, become problems of showing and telling, of representation and narrative…

Lang compares the early careers of Judith Wright and Canadian poet F. R. Scott, paying particular attention to their relationship with modernism and little magazines…

‘Central to developments in Australian literature during the period from the end of Second World War until the mid-1960s—what might be called the ‘long 1950s’—was…

‘In this essay, the radical potentialities of modernism’s dialogue with notions of the sacred will be analysed, with a particular focus on the active construction…

'I want to argue that interdisciplinary approaches to analysing cultural texts allows us to challenge such orthodoxies and open up some surprising new perspectives on…

This essay offers new insights into Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) and in particular its celebrated ‘lecture on light.’ It illuminates the…

In this essay, I show that J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello is shaped fundamentally by an engagement with Joyce’s Ulysses. However, the relationship between…

This essay uses the interwar writing of Eleanor Dark to destabilise the binary between nationalist-realism and experimental modernism in accounts of Australian literature. Dark’s novels…