Stressing the Modern

Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women's Poetry is the first major study of women's poetic careers in early twentieth-century Australia. This was a particularly prolific period for women poets as a rapidly changing social climate generated new, often still ambivalent, identities around gender, race, class, and nation. Negotiating the `modern' landscape and the `modern' psyche through the complex effects of Federation, the suffrage movement, World War I, increasing industrialisation and urbanisation, and advances in technology necessitated innovations in poetic form and a rethinking of authorship. This exciting study examines the increasing visibility and popularity of women as poets, their shaping of literary tastes through editing and criticism, their cross-influence and friendships, and the resulting backlash within Australian literary circles. Furthermore, it traces how these writers mediated their experiences of travel, expatriation, and transnationalism against the desire to produce a literature of difference, that is, poetry that was regionally or culturally distinct. Using extensive archival material, Stressing the Modern offers a new understanding of the emergence of literary modernism in Australia. It demonstrates the significance of poetry as both a popular and a radical site for articulating `modern' lives and their concerns.