Cirrus@Austlit

'This chapter illustrates the ways in which Australian women writers contested normative accounts of modernity by including powerful discussions of eugenics in their interwar fiction. Rather than providing a linear account of Australian modernity post-Federation, the chapter considers the different ways in which scholars reflect on twentieth-century modernity and how the work of cultural producers, such as writers Eleanor Dark and Christina Stead, complicates normative accounts of early nation building. Both authors coopted eugenics discourses to challenge critical aspects of development of the modern Australian state. In this enterprise, science is revealed as both progressive and regressive rather than the foundation of the nation. The authors each created a fictional family that struggles with instability and ill-health to represent the microcosm of the modern state and racialised society. Eugenics functions, therefore, as a cultural conductor of key questions across science, education, politics, health, and literary culture in early twentieth-century Australia.'

Source: Abstract

'For 20 years Charmian Clift wrote fiction and non-fiction from locations in Australia, England and Greece. When she returned to Australia from Greece in 1964, she explored new career opportunities in newspapers and television. Throughout this long period of publication Clift worked on an autobiographical fiction that she hoped to publish when time permitted. This paper examines the dimensions of a utopian spirit that supported Clift’s journey across countries and genres in search of an authorial self in which she felt most ‘at home. Travel memoir, journalism and fiction, as well as extracts from Clift’s unfinished autobiographical work ‘The End of the Morning,’ are examined to describe her engagement with utopian principles as a way of achieving, through writing, social change and personal fulfilment.' (Publication abstract)

'The voices of children in The Man Who Loved Children allow Christina Stead to re-imagine her childhood and also to provide a platform for representing the struggles of children more broadly. Using a diverse range of narrative techniques Stead orchestrates the voices of the siblings to provide a soundscape for the Pollit world that dramatizes and at times directs the eccentricities of adult behaviour. In so doing Stead grants the children a type of agency that is unusual in the framework of adult fiction and thereby offers readers a new way to think about children. The tonal qualities created by Stead to represent the collective voice of the Pollit siblings are of strategic importance to the narrative and an important strand in the array of language strategies that Stead uses to open a space for the child’s perspective. This essay examines the ‘sound’ of the children in Stead’s novel and comments on connections with Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in which children also frame narrative action. The novels present a family at a moment of social change and create an opportunity for readers to listen to the voice of the child as mediated by writers who worked with sound as a component of their experimental fiction.'

Source: Abstract.

'Charmian Clift’s Peel Me a Lotus has inspired Australian women travel writers for over half a century, but the result has been a quite different kind of writing, says Susan Carson'

This essay provides : 'a summary of the Australian literary engagement with eugenics as a broad category, followed by a discussion of the selective aspects of national and international eugenics ideas, before moving to a fuller examination of Prelude to Christopher.' (p 125)