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'THIS ESSAY DESCRIBES THE ENTANGLEMENT in Australia of three concepts: modernism; 'settler modernity'; and Aboriginality. Its three principal arguments are: (i) that European perceptions of Australian Aboriginal cultures were deeply influential in the development of modernism; (ii) that anxieties about the proximity of Aboriginal and settler peoples in Australia — but also resistance to European theories of Aboriginal culture not validated through personal experience of interacting with Aboriginal Australians — influenced strong anti-modernist sentiment among some Australian artists and writers; and (iii) that perhaps this 'anti-modernism' might instead be characterized as an 'alternative' modernism in Australia — an entanglement of visions of progress and degeneration — to which I will give the purposefully ugly label of 'antipedernism'. In developing these arguments I will make reference to Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913) as inflected by the work in Australia of Francis Gillen and Baldwin Spencer, and discuss writings by Miles Franklin in particular, as well as Katharine Susannah Prichard, D.H. Lawrence, A.D. Hope, and Christina Stead.'
Source: From paragraph one (p.89).
Notes
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Author's note: The breadth of the argument ventured here represents a new departure in my re-search, but part of the essay draws together and develops ideas initially published in two different contexts: Ian Henderson, "Uncommon Reading: Sight, Science and the 'Savage' Reader, 1850-1915," Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2010, www.nla.gov.autopenpublish/index.php/jasal/artieleiviewh5o7/2087; and Ian Henderson, "The Body of an Australian Girl: Miles Franklin's kt, Brilliant Career (1901)," in Feminism and the Body: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Catherine Kevin (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009): 116-33.