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From Cosmopolitan Romance to Transnational Fiction : Re-reading Jean Devanny’s Australian Novels single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2009... 2009 From Cosmopolitan Romance to Transnational Fiction : Re-reading Jean Devanny’s Australian Novels
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'When Jean Devanny (1894-1962) left New Zealand in 1929 bound for Sydney, she considered Australia 'merely a transit point' and planned to travel on to England, believing it to be 'a more favourable location for a novelist'. Devanny gradually came to accept Australia as her home, as Carole Ferrier argues, because of her 'double commitment' to the Communist Party of Australia and to her development as a writer. While Ferrier's pioneering scholarship and definitive biography offer invaluable insights into Devanny's life and writing, I will suggest another perspective on both by exploring how her experiences in Australia transformed her into a 'transnational' subject. (p.
215)

Notes

  • Epigraph: For that was how she had thought of Australia; that was how she had read of it; the land of the free. And freedom was the whole body of romance, its seed, its breath, its growth and its fulfillment.

    — Jean Devanny, Out of Such Fires

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Transnational Ties : Australian Lives in the World Desley Deacon (editor), Penny Russell (editor), Angela Woollacott (editor), Acton : ANU E Press , 2009 Z1786433 2009 anthology criticism biography

    Australian lives are intricately enmeshed with the world, bound by ties of allegiance and affinity, intellect and imagination. In Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, an eclectic mix of scholars—historians, literary critics, and museologists—trace the flow of people that helped shape Australia’s distinctive character and the flow of ideas that connected Australians to a global community of thought. It shows how biography, and the study of life stories, can contribute greatly to our understanding of such patterns of connection and explores how transnationalism can test biography’s limits as an intellectual, professional and commercial practice.' (Publisher's blurb)

         Acton : ANU E Press , 2009     pg. 215-228
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Last amended 17 Nov 2011 11:23:19
215-228 From Cosmopolitan Romance to Transnational Fiction : Re-reading Jean Devanny’s Australian Novelssmall AustLit logo
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