Abstract
In this chapter, Kuttainen and Lippmann offer a much-needed analysis of overlooked literary modernities in settler colonies. They focus on the figure of the Modern Girl in the female-oriented interwar magazine print cultures of Australia and Canada, and draw attention to the ways in which texts for and about women have been especially overlooked in these domains. As well as considering the appearance of the Modern Girl in magazine print culture of the 1920s and 1930s, and uncovering many images and texts featuring flapper-like figures, Kuttainen and Lippman explore the methodological implications of comparing various segments of magazine print culture. This chapter thus not only recovers absent and overlooked representations of the Modern Girl in the alternative literary modernities of Canada and Australia but also examines what it means to position this figure and the texts in which she was represented in relation to differentiated readerships.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Corinne Sandwith’s and Arti Minocha’s chapters in this collection for further examinations of the relationship between women, print culture, and the formation of modern subjectivity in South Africa and India, respectively.
- 2.
It is noteworthy that, in The Home, stories that focus on single girls are even more critical in tone. See, for example, “The Cheat” by J. Plain (The Home, November 1932, 44) and “The Bright Young Things at Bridge, etc.” by Dudley Gordon (May 1932, 42), both of which are satires of the Modern Girl.
- 3.
Notably, Mackie’s Modern Girls also regularly threaten to step out of the unspoken boundaries of class and race. Infatuated with his air of cosmopolitan sophistication, Tannis Chown pursues a romantic relationship with Adolph, even though her Anglo-Celtic admirers “Nick” and “Drew” call him a “dago” (Mayfair, February 1932, 54). As a figure, the Modern Girl is fraught with risk; Mackie’s stories in Mayfair indulge in the fantasy of frisson and freedom which she seductively offers, but the plot’s stylized resolution tends to restore her to the safe bounds of social propriety.
- 4.
“The Run Across” (January 1932, 12, 13, 47) is another such Modern Girl story in The Western Home Monthly in which female resourcefulness and independence is celebrated. Its author, Louis Arthur Cunningham, was, like Lavack, one of Canada’s most prolific writers of interwar magazine fiction who has been largely forgotten.
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Kuttainen, V., Lippmann, J. (2020). Alternative Imaginaries of the Modern Girl: A Comparative Examination of Canadian and Australian Magazines. In: Aliakbari, R. (eds) Comparative Print Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36891-3_3
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