"One of the major developments in literary studies of the past two decades is the resurgence of interest in the discursive fields of both modernism and modernity. This chapter asks what the case of Australian modernism can offer to global modernism studies. In many ways, Australian modernism provides an exemplary illustration of the temporal, geographical, vertical, and aesthetic expansions theorised by the ‘new modernist’ studies. Yet Australian modernism can also point to some of the problems, blind spots, and elisions of expanded theorisations of modernism. By exploring examples from both settler and Indigenous art and literature, this chapter shows that the concepts produced in the metropolitan centres of modernism studies can be modified and made more nuanced by coming into contact with the complexities of a settler-colonial situation."
Source: Abstract.
'This is a piece of creative non-fiction merging art commentary, literary analysis, and a personal account of the writer’s research. Changes across time in the writer’s understanding of an Australian painting – Breakfast Piece (1936) by Herbert Badham – are examined, with the writer’s slowness to comprehend the painting’s overt allusion to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (Abyssinia) highlighted. The writer’s discovery that Breakfast Piece was reproduced on the covers of a 1985 edition of Eleanor Dark’s 1945 novel The Little Company and a 1991 edition of Elizabeth Harrower’s 1966 novel The Watch Tower provokes an analysis of these authors’ treatment of international geopolitical affairs and local gender relations.' (Publication abstract)
