AustLit

'In The Fin de Siècle Imagination in Australia, 1890–1914, Mark Hearn uses a biographical method to investigate the influence of ‘powerful movements’ and new ideas on seven select Australian writers, activists, and politicians, who are distinguished by their differences of race, class, and gender. The test subjects, in order, are the working-class writer Henry Lawson; the feminist activists Rose Summerfield and Vida Goldstein; the poet and academic Christopher Brennan; the journalist-turned-politician and, ultimately, prime minister Alfred Deakin; the First Nations writer and inventor David Unaipon; and the working-class activist John Dwyer. The book is organised into an introduction, the seven biographical chapters, and a brief conclusion.' (Introduction)

'The primary aim of Mark Hearn’s The Fin de Siècle Imagination in Australia is to chart interactions between the rise of Australian nationalism and the global conditions that facilitated this political establishment. By focusing on how ‘global exchanges’ (4) of various kinds contributed to ‘the emerging Australian nation’ (5), Hearn draws on recent fin de siècle scholarship by Michael Saler and others as he seeks to interrogate the older myths that were content to promote Australian culture as a repository of bush mateship and pastoral separatism. Instead, Hearn emphasises the impact of the telegraph, undersea cables and other new forms of communication technology, and he suggests convincingly how ‘Australia helped to shape the global fin de siècle’ (6), actively participating in the creative energies associated in manifold ways with the contradictory worlds of intellectual degeneration and progressive politics.' (Introduction)