Cirrus@Austlit

'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 mix modernist and experimental styles with middlebrow and vernacular forms, while also legitimating settler nationalist desires. This constellation was not unique to Dark but was part of a broader phenomenon which I call interwar settler modernism: the modernism produced by settler artists and writers between the wars, often through a promiscuous engagement with elite, middlebrow and vernacular forms of culture. Dark’s novel Return to Coolami (1936) exemplifies interwar settler modernism, combining recognisably modernist techniques with middlebrow romance, elements of vernacular culture such as photography, cinema and motor travel, and cultural-nationalist ideas. This study traces some of the contours of interwar settler modernism through examining Dark’s ideas about visual perception, time, memory and interior psychological states. It will explore the implications of settler modernism for studies of Australian literature and, more broadly, for global modernism studies.'

Source: Abstract.

' Three decades on from his death, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) remains arguably Latin America’s most widely-translated and influential twentieth-century writer at a world-scale (Sánchez-Prado 33). This study provides the first detailed account of Borges’s Australian reception, covering the period from the publication of the first two English anthologies of his work until the thirtieth anniversary of his death. Borges raises some interesting methodological questions for Australianists. What happened when this great Latin American modernist, having been translated and canonised by the northern metropole, suddenly became widely read and highly influential in another space at the southern periphery of the world republic of letters? What are the implications of the way Borges’s work has been read in Australia for recent transnational critical methodologies that tend to view world literature as a series of interactions between a Northern centre and Southern periphery? To what extent can world literature, as it has been formulated in Europe and the United States, account for the flow of texts, literary forms, and influence between Latin America and Australia? A diachronic survey of Australian responses to Borges’s writing – including texts by Martin Johnston, Helen Daniel and Michelle Cahill – allows the essay to track Australian literary culture's deepening engagement with Latin American writing across the Cold War period and beyond.'

Source: Abstract.

'This article sets out to explore the literary aspirations and career of the early post-federation Australian writer William Gosse Hay through the extensive collection of personal papers he left behind him. Hay was born into an affluent Adelaide family in 1875, and attended Melbourne Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, before marrying and settling down to a reclusive life in the Adelaide foothills to begin writing full time. He eventually published six novels and a collection of short stories. Many of these were favourably reviewed, but they failed to attract significant commercial success. After a brief revival of critical interest in his writing after his death in 1945, Hay once again faded from prominence – remembered only in passing as an enigmatic figure who fell outside of the mainstream of Australian literary production. In tracing Hay’s pursuit of literary success and popular notoriety through his personal papers, the article draws on recent archival studies research to explore Hay’s career from the ‘inside’ and considers the role of the archive itself as a factor in his quest for recognition.'

Source: Abstract.

'In her long-running annual column for the Adelaide Observer, ‘Gossip about Children’s Books’, Australian writer and social reformer, Catherine Helen Spence, maintained that ‘the enjoyment of a good story’ was key to a good education. Literature and education were, for Spence, inextricably intertwined and mutually reinforcing and the fate of the South Australian colony in which she lived was dependent, she argued, on its young citizens receiving a decent education. While Spence’s successive critics and biographers have well documented her advocacy of education, children’s social welfare and women’s emancipation, little attention has been focused on Spence’s literature for children. This essay will argue that Spence’s didactic short stories for the young bring together these interconnected strands of Spence’s more public activism and are significantly influenced by the pedagogic thinking of late eighteenth-century British and Irish educationists, such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Maria Edgeworth. Moreover, this essay will further suggest that Spence's short stories significantly prefigure the critically acknowledged turn in Australian's children's literature to domestic urban realism and family saga in the 1890s and early 1900s. It will utilise as its central focus Spence’s short stories for children in Adelaide Observer published throughout the 1880s, as well as her two short stories for Australia's first homegrown school reader, The Children's Hour, published in 1889 and 1890. These stories, this essay will illustrate, explicitly develop an economic sub-narrative that positions their child readers (particularly their female child readers) as active participants in consumer culture and, potentially, a force for the collective economic good of the South Australian colony for which Spence worked so hard.'

Source: Abstract.