Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 “Where’s Home, Ulysses?” Judith Wright in Europe 1937
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'When Judith Wright travelled to Europe in the “loaded spring” of February 1937, the 22-year-old poet found herself witness to “a break in the consciousness of Europe”. This article argues that Wright’s experience of being an outsider in Europe at this crucial historical moment had profound implications for her poetics, in the form of a compound and productive series of displacements. Her peripatetic encounters with European cultures-in-crisis caused Wright to despair of Europe as a source of political and creative renewal, and exposed fault lines in her own cultural orientation. Sundered from her Anglophile cultural inheritance, and able to reflect on home with the distance and imaginative ambivalence of an outsider, Wright invoked Ulysses — that archetypal poetic wanderer — whose experience of archipelagic journeying came to express for her the contingencies and hauntedness of Australia’s palimpsestic identity. This essay positions the shifting perspectives and excursive patterns of Wright’s developing poetics in relation to concepts of outsideness and embodiment, drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and phenomenological philosophies of mind.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 52 no. 2 June 2017 11376338 2017 periodical issue

    'This Editorial feels like it is being written from a very dark place and time, in view of the seismic shifts in the world order which have happened over the past year. In June 2016, a majority of the British electorate voted for the UK to leave the European Union. The referendum drama unfolded amid a toxic set of debates around race and immigration, which continue to dominate the political conversation. With the continental far right also currently experiencing a surge driven by similar nationalist, racist, and Islamophobic agendas, the whole postwar European project of alliance and unity, however flawed, may be in jeopardy. At the same time, hypermasculine, autocratic ideologues across the world — including Vladimir Putin in Russia and Narendra Modi in India — appear to be learning from each other’s playbooks. Meanwhile, in the United States, the election of Donald Trump signals disaster for both human and environmental justice, the scale of which we are only beginning to see.' (Editorial introduction)

    2017
    pg. 331–349
Last amended 15 Jun 2017 09:11:47
331–349 “Where’s Home, Ulysses?” Judith Wright in Europe 1937small AustLit logo The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
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