AustLit

'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)