Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s-1960s

Description

Australian and international modernity from the late 19th to the mid-20th century inspires research in many fields of cultural endeavour: architecture, fine arts, design, cinema, theatre, and music; in urban studies, literary history and Aboriginal studies. Impact of the Modern brings together examples of this new interdisciplinary work on modern Australian culture by 21 leading scholars. Their writings reveal an original account of 'modernising' Australia as dynamic and creative in many art forms, and interactively linked with international processes and ideas. The essays in Impact of the Modern were presented as papers at the conference, 'Australian Vernacular Modernities', convened by the editors at the University of Queensland in 2006. Plenary papers by Jill Julius Matthews and Angela Woollacott signal the book's focus on the erotic and gendered spaces, and on popular aspects of modernity. They provide the central focus of the material, through such vital and dynamic categories as the 'modern', the 'erotic' and the 'primitive'. As essential components of the historical processes of innovation and modernisation, these central questions of gender and public sociality are taken up in diverse ways in the other chapters, forming a varied and exciting study of a range of creative Australian engagements with modern international life and popular culture.

Robert Dixon is professor of Australian literature at the University of Sydney. He is a general editor in Sydney University Press' Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series. Veronica Kelly is professor emerita in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland.

'The collection is engagingly interdisciplinary and makes a convincing case for prosopography as a useful tool for understanding both modernism and a wide range of performances in Australia in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.' -- Liz Schafer * New Theatre Quarterly * 'Impact of the Modern provides a series of entry points into "the modern" in an Australian context and as such, is a welcome complement to recent volumes on the immediate subject while offering much to the wider field of modernist studies.' -- Tanya Dalziell * Modernism/Modernity * ' ... this impressive volume is a must for researchers interested in all aspects of modernism and modernity, from an Australian perspective and beyond.' -- Joanne Tompkins * Contemporary Theatre Review * ' ... this is a volume which any Australianist scholar interested in cultural history, and its popular manifestations, can dip into. Much new knowledge is demonstrated here as well as new discoveries about old traditions and the place of Australia within the climate of international modernist debate in the period 1870 to 1960.' -- Victor Emeljanow * Australasian Drama Studies *