Cirrus@Austlit

'Patrick White (1912–1990) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973 and remains one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. This book represents new work by an outstanding list of White scholars from around the globe. This collection of diverse and original essays is notable for its acknowledgement of White’s homosexuality in relation to the development of his literary style, in its consideration of the way his writing ‘works’ on/with readers, and for its contextualizing of his life and oeuvre in relation to London and to London life.' (Publication summary)

'THIS ESSAY DESCRIBES THE ENTANGLEMENT in Australia of three concepts: modernism; 'settler modernity'; and Aboriginality. Its three principal arguments are: (i) that European perceptions of Australian Aboriginal cultures were deeply influential in the development of modernism; (ii) that anxieties about the proximity of Aboriginal and settler peoples in Australia — but also resistance to European theories of Aboriginal culture not validated through personal experience of interacting with Aboriginal Australians — influenced strong anti-modernist sentiment among some Australian artists and writers; and (iii) that perhaps this 'anti-modernism' might instead be characterized as an 'alternative' modernism in Australia — an entanglement of visions of progress and degeneration — to which I will give the purposefully ugly label of 'antipedernism'. In developing these arguments I will make reference to Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913) as inflected by the work in Australia of Francis Gillen and Baldwin Spencer, and discuss writings by Miles Franklin in particular, as well as Katharine Susannah Prichard, D.H. Lawrence, A.D. Hope, and Christina Stead.'

Source: From paragraph one (p.89).