Abstract
In the opening chapter of A History of Australian Literature Ken Goodwin suggests that there are ‘two major rival determinants’ in the literature of Australia: the British written cultural tradition, which settlers brought with them to Australia, and the totally different environment of the new land, including the unwritten culture of its Aboriginal inhabitants. In addition, there is the fact that these settlers were, to begin with, mostly convicts — outcasts from the mother country, and often from backgrounds, Irish and Scottish, for example, which made them unsympathetic to established British values. Consequently, although there are many modern Australians who still ‘emphasize commonality with and derivativeness from Britain’, they ‘exist alongside vociferous nationalists … and those who reject both colonialism and nationalism in favour either of internationalism … or of personal withdrawal and self-identification’.
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Notes
Allen Curnow, Selected Poems 1940–1989 (London: Penguin Books, 1990) p. 204.
Patrick Evans, The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature (Auckland: Penguin, 1990) p. 235.
Henry Kreisel, in Contexts of Canadian Criticism, ed. Eli Mandel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971) p. 261.
Dennis Cooley, ‘Nearer by Far: The Upset “I” in Margaret Atwood’s Poetry’, in Margaret Atzvood: Writing and Subjectivity, ed. Colin Nicholson (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1994) p. 72.
Quoted by George Woodcock, ‘Margaret Atwood: Poet as Novelist’, in Critical Essays on Margaret Atzvood, ed. Judith McCombs (Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1988) p. 98.
Margaret Atwood in Margaret Atwood: Conversations, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll (London: Virago Press, 1992) p. 14.
Robert D. Hamner, Derek Walcott (Boston: Twayne, 1981; revised edition, 1993) p. 143.
Paula Burnett explains that ‘rass’ is a Caribbean swear-word, but that in the language of Rastafarians ‘Ras’ is ‘the appellation of holiness’ (see The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, ed. Paula Burnett, London: Penguin Books, 1986, p. 420).
Clement H. Wyke, ‘“Divided to the Vein”: Patterns of Tormented Ambivalence in Walcott’s The Fortunate Traveller’, in Postcolonial Literatures, ed. Michael Parker and Roger Starkey (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1995) p. 211.
Derek Walcott, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993
Article by John Figueroa in The Art of Derek Walcott, ed. Stewart Brown (Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan: Seren Books, 1991) p. 211.
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© 1999 R. P. Draper
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Draper, R.P. (1999). Regional, National and Post-Colonial (II). In: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27433-8_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27433-8_10
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