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Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 ‘A Masterpiece of Camouflage’ : Modernism and Interwar Australia
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'Interwar Australia has often been seen as geographically and culturally distant from the centres of modernity, with 1930s Australian literary culture viewed through the tropes of isolation, insularity and quarantine. Through a reading of Eleanor Dark's experimental novel Prelude to Christopher (1934), I contest this idea, arguing that interwar Australia contained its own latent modernisms and modernities, which were often hidden alongside anti-modernist positions and inside other discourses such as cultural nationalism. This essay contributes to recent reinvestigations of the cosmopolitanism/nationalism binary and calls for these categories to be rethought in more interconnected terms. It also examines Dark's modernist and gendered critique of eugenics in light of the larger project of settler colonialism.' (Publication abstract)

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  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Modernist Cultures Modernisms : Aotearoa New Zealand–Australia–Fiji, 1926–1986 vol. 15 no. 3 August 2020 20397171 2020 periodical issue 2020 pg. 316-340
Last amended 9 Oct 2020 07:47:33
316-340 ‘A Masterpiece of Camouflage’ : Modernism and Interwar Australiasmall AustLit logo Modernist Cultures
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