From the national/cosmopolitan divide to the transnational poetics in modern Australian narrative

Abstract

The article explores the divide between the national and the cosmopolitan in Australian literature, describing its importance and evolution as it formed a contemporary transnational poetics, illustrating how this divide and its manifestations have articulated the personality of Australian literature across time. It tracks important Australian authors within this framework and analyses the sensibilities of expatriate writers and their roles as communicating vessels. Finally, it discusses important influences, such as Indigenous literature and multicultural and transnational literary production that mark new trends in recent Australian narrative production and demonstrate a new movement in Australian literature. It is a new transnational poetics that marks a discursive articulation between the heritage of postcolonial interpretation and the plurality of global particularities of world literature.

Keywords

• australian literature
• national/cosmopolitan
• transnational
• world literature
• postcolonial