Cirrus@Austlit

This essay considers 'the potential for modernist transnational writing in four geographically distinct modernist sites, as found in selected essays and fiction by Virginia Woolf, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Rebecca West, and Eleanor Dark.' (p10)

'Aileen Palmer is one of only three women represented in a recent anthology of thirty-three poets writing about their experiences of the Spanish Civil War. The other two are English writers: Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner. In The Gender of Modernism Jane Marcus comments that the neglect of Warner's writing has occurred on many fronts: 'Left out of the literary histories of the Spanish Civil War presumably because she was a woman, she is left out of literary modernism because she was a communist and a lesbian. As her partner Valentine Ackland shared Warner's marginalities so, too, did Aileen Palmer, about whom could be added two more: she was Australian and she spent many years of her life in mental institutions.' (p94)

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)

'The literary modernisms of [Nettie] Palmer and[Susannah] Prichard's generation were not a belated response to European and American developments, nor did they arise as a response to the trauma and tragedy of the Great War. Their engagement with Western European literary modernism stemmed from their direct experiences with 'the men of 1914' in London and America. When we begin with the situated perspectives of different women and understand writers as embodied subjects as a source of analytical power, new readings are possible.' (p134)

In this essay, Paxton offers 'a more specifically modernist vantage point on the fiction Devanny wrote about Australia, soon after she moved with her family to Sydney in 1929, by looking more closely at her lesser-known romances, Out of Such Fires (1934) and The Ghost Wife (1935)'. (p 150)

'It has been suggested by Susan Friedman that we might understand 'the geopolitical rhetoric of feminism' as operating 'according to a transnational grammar with a number of specific figural formations'; in particular, five tropic patterns: 'the metaphorics of nation, borders, migration, 'location' and conjuncture.' These tropes recur and can be recognized in Devanny's fiction, and also in the story of her life.' (p187)

'Christina Stead (1902-1983) was a long-time expatriate Australian writer who lived in, and wrote about Sydney, New York, Paris, London and many other European cities - she was a 'travelling modernist' par excellence. Today this geo-political and cultural range earns her the fashionable epithet, 'cosmopolitan'. But in the two decades after World War Two, when she and her American writer husband, William J. Blake, moved back to Europe and eventually settled in England, that same range earned her nothing but rejection slips and poverty. Her politicised form of modernist fiction did not travel well into the post-war period.' (p204)