Colonial Modernity single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2014... 2014 Colonial Modernity
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‘So much of the writing we see in colonial Australia registers the changing features of the physical landscape: the evolution of the colonial cities, the radical transformation of bush and country. The journals were especially committed to giving definition to the ways in which urban and regional spaces alike were utterly reshaped through the process of financial speculation and colonial expansion. New social and material structures superimpose themselves on existing ones, which they displace or marginalise – but those older forms also return over and over to give the new its self-definition. Richard Dennis makes this point in his book Cities of Modernity (2008): modernity ushers in ‘the realisation that now is not the same as then’, but it also throws these two radically different temporal moments together, recreating ‘the past as ‘other’’ as a continuing proof of the superiority of the new. The idea of a colonial modernity folds this point into further realisation that, as colonisation progresses, an otherwise remote place like Australia is at the same time embedded in global frameworks for the flow of capital and commodities. For Robert Dixon, ‘the term colonial modernity […] refers to a series of developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that linked apparently provincial cultures like those of the Australian colonies into a busy traffic in personnel, cultural practices, texts and intellectual property around the English-speaking world’. This section of our book shows the many ways in which the early Australian journals registered the ‘busy traffic’ of colonial modernity, as writers navigated their way through increasingly crowded urban streets and the demands of capital impacted on every aspect of daily life: from the rapid growth of business centres across the country to the systematic degradation of the forests and waterways.’ (Author’s introduction : 381)

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    y separately published work icon The Colonial Journals : And the Emergence of Australian Literary Culture Rachael Weaver , Ken Gelder , Crawley : UWA Publishing , 2014 6855653 2014 multi chapter work criticism

    'Colonial Australia produced a vast number of journals and magazines that helped to create an exuberant literary landscape. They were filled with lively contributions by many of the key writers and provocateurs of the day - and of the future. Important Australian writers such as Marcus Clarke, Rolf Boldrewood, Ethel Turner and Katharine Susannah Prichard published for the first time in these journals. In The Colonial Journals, Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver present a fascinating selection of material: a miscellany of content that enabled the 'free play of intellect' to thrive and, matched with wry visual design, made attractive artifacts that demonstrate the role this period played in the growth of an Australian literary culture.' (Publication blurb)

    Crawley : UWA Publishing , 2014
    pg. 380-433
Last amended 26 Jun 2014 12:19:12
380-433 Colonial Modernitysmall AustLit logo
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