AustLit

'This essay examines intellectual exchanges between early twentieth-century Australian literary nationalists and the Irish literary revival, with attention to the transnational and imperial differences in between. It traces the travel narratives of Vance Palmer, Esmonde Higgins and Miles Franklin in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence, their performance of New World settler ‘selfhood’ in Ireland, and their encounters with Irish literary contacts including George William Russell (Æ) and Darrell Figgis. In historicising these encounters in relation to settler-colonial ambivalence, it argues that Australian literary travel narratives of revolutionary Ireland were constituted around multiple displacements of meaning between Irish nationalist and Australian settler-nativist constructions of autochthony. As urban intellectual milieux outside the networks of Irish ethnic associationalism, these literary connections offer a culturally hybrid location in which to re-examine the play of overdetermined meanings around Ireland in early interwar (‘White’) Australia. Situated in relation to Irish historical contexts external to Australian nationalist narratives, these dislocations of meaning illuminate an excess of Irelands in settler radical political imaginaries beyond stable constructions of nation or place.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.