Postmodernist and Literary Experiments

This chapter examines postmodernist and literary experiments in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific. It first considers Australia's brand of postmodernism, noting that it was much less a reaction to modernism than an effect of American influences that developed mid-century and a reflection on its late emergence from the colonial condition. It shows that Australian literature and its institutions since the 1930s had maintained a distant and uncomfortable relationship with literary modernism. Key writers discussed include Peter Carey, Gerald Murnane, and Elizabeth Jolley. The chapter goes on to discuss how Canada's scholars and writers, such as Robert Kroetsch, George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt have been interwoven in the genealogy of postmodern fiction in the Americas before concluding with an analysis of the postmodern novel in New Zealand and the South Pacific. Important writers here include Ian Wedde, Albert Wendt, and Sia Figiel.

Are you a dissident? Art and diplomacy - two encounters

Although his background was in science, the ambassador reminded me that, because he was a Russian, art and poetry were deeply, deeply rooted in his psyche. It followed that he knew well the Moscow writers’ centre, the Gorkiy Institute, which I had visited with the poets Ian Wedde and Tusiata Avia a few months earlier. (We had stood in the room where Mayakovsky made his last public address, and beside the desk where he wrote some of his greatest verse...) Not far from Red Square, the Gorkiy Institute is a part of the Russian soul, he said, just as literature and art are. A Russian can never be a stranger to poetry.