Ann Vickery

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Biographical note:  Ann Vickery is a Monash Fellow in the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at Monash University, Australia. She is the author of Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (Wesleyan University Press, 2000) and has published widely in Australian and contemporary American poetries. A founding member of HOW2, a journal of innovative women’s writing and scholarship, she was its editor-in-chief between 2001 and 2002.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857875
ISBN:  9781876857875
Author:  Ann Vickery
Title:  Stressing the Modern
Series:  Salt Studies in Contemporary Poetry
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Jun-07
Extent:  320pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  18 mm
Weight:  480 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 16.99
Price:  USD 26.99
Rights:  World

Main description:  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.

Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1. Mary Gilmore: A Feminine World Expanding Outward
Chapter 2. Marie Pitt: Cui Bono? The Poetics of Protest
Chapter 3: Mary Fullerton: Finding Form for the Woman Soul
Chapter 4: Anna Wickham: Between a Modernist Passport & House Arrest
Chapter 5: Zora Cross: Love and the Modern Girl
Chapter 6: Lesbia Harford: Writing Revolution
Chapter 7: Nettie Palmer: Another Path Taken

Excerpt from book:  

from the Introduction

In feminist literary criticism, gender has tended to eclipse issues of genre. This has been particularly true in the field of Australian literature. Drusilla Modjeska’s influential Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925-1945 (1981) is presented as an overview of Australian women’s writing in the first half of the twentieth century. Focussing almost solely on the novel, poets remain absent or marginal figures. As Elizabeth Webby points out, such prioritising extends to nineteenth-century Australian literature as critics have tended to focus on writers like Rosa Praed, Tasma, and Barbara Baynton. When writers have worked across various genres such as Ada Cambridge, Catherine Martin, or Caroline Leakey, it is their novels that have generally attracted attention. Modjeska rationalises the slant of her study by contending that there “was a period of hiatus between the late nineteenth century women writers and the new generation of the thirties”. While “[t]he literary had come to be dominated by poetry,” “literary groups were dominated by men,” thus producing “a hostile environment for women writers”. She concludes, “There was little to encourage them to stay in Australia then or during any of the early years of this century”.

The predominantly masculine lens through which modern Australian poetry has been appraised and reproduced has reinforced this dismissal. Literary criticism has celebrated a selective tradition that normalises a particular gendered set of practices as the only modernism. In Australia, this tradition was constructed around a sense of difference that was not only gender coded but geographically informed. The Australian modernist canon generally privileges the metropolitan over the provincial, the formally experimental over the realist and popular. It favours a depoliticised and purely artistic stance. Kenneth Slessor is often viewed as the first truly modern poet. Accordingly, Philip Mead and John Tranter open their anthology, The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, with his work. Significantly, Slessor positioned his aesthetics as apposite to the bush verse tradition of the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and the suburban niceties of the woman poet, on the other. Through his and the like-minded vision of the Lindsay circle, women’s poetry was devalued as marginal and positioned in a second-rate and separate sphere of cultural production.

The Lindsay circle condemned the experimentation that was occurring in European art. As art historians like Caroline Jordan have demonstrated, European modernism was largely introduced to Australia between the wars and dominated by women artists. Finding acceptance within commercial and applied art, it was associated with the fashionable, the decorative, and the suburban. European modernism became aligned with women’s genres and interests, Lionel Lindsay suggesting that “Picassism and coloured cubism” should be limited to “textile patterning and posters”. Instead, the Lindsays and their acolytes mobilised an Arcadian pastoral to give a mythic dimension to the spaces and pleasures around the contemporary Antipodean city. “Woman” in such a vision did not create but was rather an object of masculine enjoyment. The figure of the woman poet—like that of the mother—was an alien concept. Women were not deemed modernist poets until the 1950s and 60s, falling prey to the common critical assignation of women as “second generation,” worthy practitioners rather than pioneering innovators.

Only recently has there been some (fairly slight) shifts, with Les Murray following up his 1994 Fivefathers anthology (which featured Kenneth Slessor, Roland Robinson, David Campbell, James McAuley, and Frances Webb) with a sequel anthology, Hell and After (2005). Three of the four featured poets published in the early twentieth century and include Mary Gilmore and Lesbia Harford. Yet Murray maintains that the ‘five fathers’ of his earlier volume, along with two or three others, were “the prime figures in the finest period our poetry has seen”. To “complete” this canonical formation, his subsequent anthology adds “four of the best Australian poets from before that magical era” from the 1930s to the 1960s. Murray’s temporal distinction is a dubious one as collections by John Shaw Neilson, Lesbia Harford, and Mary Gilmore were all produced during his “magical era” and they were clearly contemporaries of Slessor. Furthermore, the role of gender in his critical mapping remains elided.

Anthologies of Australian women’s poetry belie a dearth of or derivation in women’s poetry of the early twentieth century. Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn feature poems from at least twelve women writing between 1901 and 1940 in The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (1986) and Susan Lever selects over twenty in The Oxford Book of Australian Women’s Verse (1995). The magisterial size of Strauss’s recent academy edition of Gilmore’s verse gives some indication of how truly prolific Gilmore was and is only the first of two volumes! Moreover, Kay Ferres’ edited collection, The Time to Write: Australian Women Writers, 1890-1930 (1991), goes some way to redressing Modjeska’s genre bias by covering a range of literary forms such as poetry, journalism, and the memoir. However, while Jennifer Strauss undertakes a fine comparative reading of Mary Gilmore and Lesbia Harford, the poetry of Mary Fullerton and Nettie Palmer is sidelined in discussions of their other work.

Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry is the first major study of modern Australian women’s poetry. As it demonstrates, the first part of the twentieth century was a prolific period for women poets. The work they produced challenged previously given roles of gender and negotiated a rapidly changing social climate. Australia became an independent nation in 1901. By 1903, it “was the only country where white women could both vote and stand for national parliament”. Poetry written between 1900 and 1940 reflected the suffrage movement, as well as the effects of Federation, World War I, increasing industrialisation and, emergent discourses of sexology and psychology. New subject formations were taking place around gender, race, and nationalism. Women writers would also move between contrasting sensibilities and styles.

Influenced by critical studies like Marianne DeKoven’s Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (1991), Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace’s Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (im)positionings (1994), Bonnie Kime Scott’s Refiguring Modernism (1995), and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry 1908-1934 (2001), Stressing the Modern takes a cultural-based approach to Australian literary modernism, investigating how writers revised and experimented with poetic form to respond to current social and political debates. A culturalist project emphasises the context of literary production, opening up what are otherwise hidden discourses that exist behind and around the text at hand. Rather than an ahistorical critique, this approach enables modernism to be related back to modernities (new subject formations emerging around gender, race and nationalism), thus leading us to rethink what “modernist” might mean in Australia in the early twentieth century. As Rita Felski discerns in The Gender of Modernity, Victorian discourse often segued into Edwardian and modernist; “older conceptual frames do not simply disappear, but interact with newer paradigms in complicated processes of mutual contamination as well as active contestation”. This book seeks to undo dualistic paradigms of “dominant” and “marginal” or “high” and “low”, forcing us instead to ask: How does Australian women’s poetry challenge received theories of modernism? How might new regional and gender-specific modernisms be generated through reading such poetry?

As DuPlessis points out, the weakness of context-rich, situationalist readings can be their lack of textual specificity. Besides a couple of brief overviews, much of the scholarship on Australian women poets of the early twentieth-century has been biographical work of individual figures. This work was mostly undertaken in the 1980s as part of second wave feminism’s need to map out a women’s history and includes Lesley Parson’s thesis on Lesbia Harford (1976), Colleen Burke’s Doherty’s Corner: The Life and Works of Poet Marie E.J. Pitt (1985), Drusilla Modjeska’s introduction to The Poems of Lesbia Harford (1985), W.H. Wilde’s Courage A Grace: A Biography of Dame Mary Gilmore (1988), Deborah Jordan’s Nettie Palmer: Search for an Aesthetic (1999 but completed as a doctoral thesis in 1982), and Jennifer Vaughan Jones’ Anna Wickham: A Poet’s Daring Life (2003 but completed as a doctoral thesis in 1994). There is also Michael Sharkey’s detailed article on Zora Cross (1990) and Sylvia Martin’s Passionate Friends which examines the relationship between Mary Fullerton, Miles Franklin, and Mabel Singleton (1996).

The dominant approach in these studies tends towards a reductive textual analysis where the work is read as demonstrative of the life. Modjeska, for instance, reads Harford’s poetry “more as a by-product of her life than a centre to it”. Jones and Martin are careful to articulate a distinction between poetic speaker and author in their often sophisticated readings of Wickham and Fullerton’s writing respectively, and there are a number of fine critical essays that exist on Mary Gilmore’s poetry. However, there is still a need to consider the relationship between writers’ positioning within the poetic field both during and after their career and the works they produced. In examining writers’ poetic development and reputations alongside one another, it becomes possible to discover patterns of cultural production and reception more clearly. The challenge lies, then, in the need to mediate between the historical and social dimensions of modern poetry in Australia and its textual specificity”. In the process, the following questions arise: Why did women writers choose poetry as a form and what aesthetic and political issues did they grapple with in that choice? What might poetry have enabled that other genres, such as the novel, the diary, or the essay, did not? And what were its limitations?

This book joins Susan Sheridan’s Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing, 1880s-1930s in being “part of a wider feminist project of reading women writers together, with and against one another, for differences as well as similarities in what they tried to create out of the knowledges and commitments and desires that textured their lives”. It emphasises the importance of poetry as a space through which responses to the surrounding culture could occur and as a space to articulate new subjectivities. Such an approach does not jettison the valuable feminist histories undertaken to date, but rather adjusts the focus. Seven poets have been selected as case studies: Mary Gilmore (b. 1865), Mary Fullerton (b.1868), Marie Pitt (b. 1869), Anna Wickham (b.1884), Nettie Palmer (b.1885), Zora Cross (b. 1890), and Lesbia Harford (b. 1891). While their poetic careers sometimes reflect quite different choices and orientations, they also shared many interests and influences such that they might be considered representative of women poets of the period.

Unpublished endorsement :  This study is also an outstanding instance of contemporary criticism, a brilliant blend of original archival research, in-depth contextualisation of the poetry, and authoritative biographical framing of these women’s lives as writers, feminists, intellectuals, lawyers, political activists, publishers and journalists. It will focus international critical and scholarly attention on the many defining contributions these women poets have made to modernism in Australia.

Philip Mead

Unpublished endorsement :  Ann Vickery and Salt Publishing have performed a great service for Australian literary culture. The publication of Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women's Poetry delivers to scholars, poets and all those interested in Australia’s rich poetic culture, a detailed and fascinating account of what it meant, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to be a woman, an intellectual, a poet in Australia.

Lyn McCredden

Unpublished endorsement :  Stressing the Modern is an informative and fascinating volume. These seven Australian women poets – Gilmore, Pitt, Fullerton, Wickham, Cross, Harford, Palmer – can at last be fully celebrated as the early voices of Australia's dynamic poetry culture! Students of Australian literature, and everyone interested in poetry, will be exuberant at the publication of this important, much needed critical work.

Lyn McCredden