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