AustLit

'In his case study of Desiderata, a literary journal published in Adelaide from 1929 to 1939, David Carter studies the cross currents of literary modernism's reception among elite and middlebrow circles in this provincial city. On the basis of fresh archival research, he proposes an elegant model of the relations between local and international literary space, extending from Anglocentrism at one end to provincialism at the other, reflecting Casanova's distinction between national and international orientations. But in an innovative turn that resists and complicates her often hard binaries, he suggests that we can we can distinguish provincial and modernising forms of cultural identification at both ends of the spectrum...' (From Introduction p. xv)