Literary History and Avant-Garde Poetics in the Antipodes - (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Avant-Garde Writing) by A J Carruthers (Paperback)

About the Book

Examines Australian avant-garde poetry from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries

Book Synopsis

Avant-garde poetry in the Antipodes causes all sorts of trouble for literary history. It is an avant-garde that seems to arrive too late and yet right on time. In 1897, Christopher Brennan made his own version of Un Coup de Dés, the same year Mallarmé published it in Cosmopolis. In the 1940s, the same period avant-gardism was declared dead or fatally injured due to the Ern Malley affair, Harry Hooton began writing a significant body of experimental poetry. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Australian Dada emerged 'belatedly' through figures like Jas H. Duke (Tristan Tzara had previously sung Aboriginal songs at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916). First Nations and Migrant poets then began reinventing avant-garde poetry in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book maintains that such a confounding literary history poses a distinct challenge to the theories of the avant-gardes we have become accustomed to and changes our perspective of avant-garde time.

Review Quotes

An audacious and truly transnational remapping of Antipodean avant-gardes that musters the usual suspects only to change that history by introducing new players who had long been hiding in plain sight. By centering artists such as Ania Walwicz, Jas Duke, Lionel Fogarty and others such as Ouyang Yu, Carruthers conducts Antipodean poetics as a synaesthetic symphony that generates new cross-hemispheric collaborations and collusions.

--Sneja Gunew, University of British Columbia