earticle

영어

Australian poetry rarely plays a role in academic narratives about the origins of English- language literary modernism. This essay spotlights Christopher Brennan’s italies (1913) as an example of a text that deserves more widespread attention. Its author recoils from the historical processes pushing Australia to separate from Britain, and he recognizes that the “old dream of kingship,” the colonial imaginary, cannot be sustained intact and inviolate. He responds by withdrawing from the world and self- reflexively? exalting the book as the only place the old magic can survive. Modernism, in this scenario, is born through evasion, displacement, and escape. What saves italies-what insures that it is more than retro-imperial escapism--is its thorough-going disruptive, broken texture. The act of imagination necessary to reject decolonization wrenches language until it becomes strange and new.