Modernity

Australian Letters, 'a quarterly review of writing and criticism', was launched in Adelaide in 1957. Max Harris, co-owner of the Mary Martin Bookshop, poet…

Readers of Shirley Hazzard's fiction have long been familiar with the ways her densely allusive prose embeds her stories and her characters in European art…

This paper compares short stories by Patrick White and American John Cheever, arguing that their representations of suburbia and modernity show fundamentally different approaches to…

Compares the work of Gail Jones with that of New Zealand author Elizabeth Knox.

‘Peter Otto’s essay … argues that the novel’s temporal frame, and its evocation of a species of Gothicism, challenges conventional periodisation’ (p.4). The author argues…

Elizabeth Harrower’s first novel, Down in the City (1957), introduces concerns that define her oeuvre, offering a typically adroit depiction of destructive domestic relations and…

In Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), Christina Stead evokes the city’s history in her naming of the Tank Stream Press, the novel’s central location…

This essay offers new insights into Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) and in particular its celebrated ‘lecture on light.’ It illuminates the…

The rise of steampunk – speculative-fiction works set in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian world marked by steam-powered technology – has led to a range of…

On the cover of The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity fashionably dressed men and women lean against…

Grouping sets of novels and stories to elucidate the functions of key tropes in Jones’s fiction, Dalziell covers the writer’s entire output up to 2020…