Alternative imaginaries of the modern girl: a comparative examination of Canadian and Australian magazines
Kuttainen, Victoria, and Lippmann, Jilly (2020) Alternative imaginaries of the modern girl: a comparative examination of Canadian and Australian magazines. In: Aliakbari, Rasoul, (ed.) Comparative Print Culture: A Study of Alternative Literary Modernities. New Directions in Book History . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 41-60.
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Abstract
Longstanding meta-narratives about modernity and modernism have not only neglected gender, as the epigram above from Rita Felski suggests, but also overlooked whole nations, including Canada and Australia. Standard accounts of their literature tend to focus on narratives of either the pioneering and settlement phases of the colonial era or the development of their self-consciously national literatures in the aftermath of the Second World War. In fact, the shared origins of these settler dominions, as well as their "struggle to legitimate the national literature" and overcome "the colonial mentality" which continued well into the post-war years to "disparage... the local product" (McDougall and Whitlock 1987, 7) stimulated the first of many comparative approaches to their literatures. This chapter extends this long tradition of comparative Australian and Canadian literary studies into an comparison of magazine print culture. It focuses on the overlooked figure of the Modern Girl in these contexts, a figure more often associated with the British bright young thing or the paradigmatic American flapper. It reveals a wealth of stories about the Modern Girl that appeared in the magazines of the interwar period in Canada and Australia, which have been heretofore overlooked. Its comparative approach also unearths fascinating and complex attitudes toward her and toward writing which featured her, in this colonial milieus which were still struggling to establish their own legitimate national literatures.
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