Placing Antipodean Modernism : Modernist Women Writers from Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand

Abstract

The many untold stories of literary modernism spread across the globe and traverse a wide spectrum of subjects and disciplines. Literary modernism’s rhizomatic presence makes it almost impossible to draw a single line of development for this creative phenomenon. This thesis focuses on Antipodean women’s writings and their interventions into literary modernism. As former settler colonies of the Great Britain yet separated from it by the tyranny of distance, both Australia and New Zealand retain cultural lineage to the metropolitan centre while sharing a mixed and ambivalent attachment to it. A masculine tradition in the two countries’ literary cultures further impedes the emergence of women’s modernist writings. Antipodean women’s modernist writings attest to geographical and cultural contacts on a world scale and are complicated by both similarities and differences across the Tasman Sea. Through a manifold engagement in gender, cultural, postcolonial, transnational, and cosmopolitan critical discourses, this thesis highlights in particular the question of location inflected in Antipodean women’s modernist writings. Theoretically re-visiting and re-constructing the term “Antipodean Modernism,” it pivots on comparative readings of six Antipodean women writers. Katherine Mansfield and Christina Stead’s “Expatriate Modernism” demonstrates interactions between literary cultures across the north and the south. Their works set in Germany, France, and the Antipodean home countries complement and contest our imagination of what expatriation to Europe could offer to these literary women. Robin Hyde and Ethel Anderson’s literary careers stand for what this thesis proposes as “Modernism En Route.” Their encounters with stops between the Antipodean south and the Asian and metropolitan north generate a fourth dimensional imaginative and perceptual creative power. Eleanor Dark and Janet Frame display in their works a “Modernism in Place” which indicates the dynamics of their immediate Antipodean home. They imbue investigations of both local and global modernity and have an inward focus on human subjectivity. This thesis places Antipodean Modernism across the global sphere by means of looking into the factual and imaginative mobility of its women writers. It corroborates the simultaneous emergence of multiple modernisms outside its presumed hubs and promises Antipodean Modernism’s pivotal position in current discussions of literary modernism.