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'In an increasingly global world literary and cultural critics are constantly searching for ways in which to analyse and debate texts and artefacts. Postcolonial theories and studies have provided useful tools for analyzing, among others, New Literatures in English and other languages, as well as throwing new light on an understanding of older texts. But today, with the increase in diaspora studies in literature and cultural studies, new ways of looking at texts are paramount, given the complexity of contemporary literature. There is, as Bill Ashcroft writes, a 'strange contrapuntal relationship between identity, history, and nation that needs to be unravelled.' With references to Australian literature, this article will present some reflections on transculturation and modernities, the themes of the Nordic Network of Transcultural Literary Studies, which considers transculturation not as a theory but, 'a matrix through which a set of critical tools and vocabularies can be refined for the study of texts from a localized world, but institutionalised globally' and where , ' the engagement of multiple sites and their routes with the progression of "one modernity" in some way or other inform the aesthetics of transcultural literature.' (Author's introduction)
'This essay contends that the Australian novelist Patrick White (1912-1990) presents, in his novel The Solid Mandala (1966), a prototypical evocation of late modernity that indicates precisely why and how it was different from the neoliberal and postmodern era that succeeded it. Late modernity is currently emerging as a historical period, though still a nascent and contested one. Robert Hassan speaks of the 1950-1970 era as a period which, in its 'Fordist' mode of production maintained a certain conformity yet held off the commoditisation of later neoliberalism's 'network-driven capitalism'. This anchors the sense of 'late modernity,' that will operate in this essay, though my sense of the period also follows on definitions of the term established, in very different contexts, by Edward Lucie-Smith and Tyrus Miller.' (Author's introduction)
'Amy T. Matthews won the 2010 Adelaide Festival Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript for End of the Night Girl (Wakefield Press, 2011), a novel about an Adelaide waitress haunted by the Holocaust. Transnational Literature editor Gillian Dooley spoke to her about the challenges of writing on this immense, vexed subject.' (Introduction)
