AustLit

'Elizabeth McMahon and Brigitta Olubas’s edited work Antigone Kefala: New Australian Modernities is more than an overdue tribute to a significant Australian writer from elsewhere, who has continued to publish her work for over half a century. This collection traces Antigone Kefala’s life and her publishing career in Australia, and considers her work’s reception. Initially, the publication shows, Kefala’s writing was classed as ethnic, and then multicultural, but more recently it has become part of a wider understanding of ‘arts for a multicultural Australia’ (McMahon and Olubas 6). The scholars and writers who have contributed their essays to this edited collection offer a mix of critical appraisal, personal reflection, and their affirmation of commitment to a shared vision for the expansion of Australian writing, embodied in Kefala’s work. As Sneja Gunew argues, we need to ‘expand and even distort our understanding of international aesthetic categories such as Modernism and to question the dominance of English within those categories so as to include and account for the multilingual’ in the story of Australian Literatures as well (7).' 

(Introduction)