Issue Details: First known date: 2011... 2011 Always the Feeling of Australia in the Air : Martin Boyd's Lucinda Brayford
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

‘”My inner division, if I have one, is the age-long one of the European, between Mediterranean and the north.” With this uncompromising sentence the novelist Martin Boyd (1893-1972) elided Australia from his own history. He repudiated the assumption that expatriation was significant to him because, quite simply, it was not his condition. We note Boyd’s personal geographical orientation. He sees the “division” entirely from the perspective of a European. Australians, it implies, may have issues of identity, but deciding whether their spiritual homeland is north or south of the Alps cannot be one of them.’ (Author’s introduction 165)

Notes

  • Epigraph:
    "I don't think you're very patriotic," said Lucinda.
    "I certainly hope not," said Paul. "Like every civilised man unless he is a Chinese, my home is in all Europe." - Martin Boyd (1946)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Lusting for London : Australian Expatriate Writers at the Hub of Empire, 1870-1950 Peter Morton , New York (City) : Palgrave Macmillan , 2011 Z1826218 2011 single work criticism

    'Long before the post-WWII migration, over one hundred Australian writers left their homeland to seek fame and fortune in London. Some made little mark despite their arduous efforts; some made a tolerable living; a few, like Martin Boyd, H.H. Richardson and Christina Stead, actually achieved permanent fame. Lusting for London analyses how these writers reacted to their new surroundings—in both their autobiographical writings and their creative work. With wit and rigor, Peter Morton studies the expatriate experience and reveals the ways in which the loss of these expatriates affected the evolving literary culture of Australia' (Publisher blurb).

    Contents: Issues of Definition and Evidence; Sailing for El Dorado: Going Home in the Literary Imagination; A Gout of Bile: Metic and Immigrant Expatriates; The Aroma of the Past: in Antipodean London; Drawing off the Rich Cream: The Struggle in London; Who Are You? No One: The Hacking Journalist in London; The Dear Old Mother Country: Richardson's The Way Home and Stead's For Love Alone; Always the Feeling of Australia in the Air: Martin Boyd's Lucinda Brayford; A Leaven of Venturesome Minds: Literary Expatriates and Australian Culture; No More Pap from the Teats of London: From Expatriation toTtransnationalism; Conclusion: A Padded Cell in Wagga Wagga.

    New York (City) : Palgrave Macmillan , 2011
    pg. 165-186
Last amended 28 Aug 2012 14:10:29
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