Modernist Fiction/Alternative Modernisms

This chapter examines the history of modernist fiction in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada within the larger context of geomodernist scholarship. It first considers how modernism relates to modernity and modernization before discussing cultural nationalism and the debate between the ‘native’ and the ‘cosmopolitan’. It then analyses boundary-troubling between realism and modernism, James Joyce's influence on fiction writers, and the works of Indigenous writers that force a reconsideration of modernism. It also explores the publishing infrastructure of modernist fiction production as well as the dialectical move between imitation and subversion as seen in Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian literatures. Finally, it provides additional contexts through which to understand how material conditions such as the availability of publication outlets shape the ways in which literary movements develop and gather momentum.