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A History of Mid-Twentieth-Century Commercial Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 June 2023
From the 1920s through to the early 1960s, a popular genre of Australian commercial fiction focused on exploring or narrating stories about the outback and more exotic parts of Australian life and geography. Writers as diverse as Ion Idriess, F. J. Thwaites and E. V. Timms used their books to help other non-indigenous Australians engage with their ‘new’ nation. This chapter draws on a some of these novels and uses them to demonstrate how these stories brought to the fore issues of belonging, race, desire and anxiety. The analysis will focus on these texts’ descriptions of love and romance, including how and when intercultural desire was represented. The chapter explores how a settler-colonial logic based on dispossession, erasure and/or assimilation is deployed by the range of authors to mark out social as well as political boundaries of belonging. Overall, the chapter addresses two questions: first, how was Australia imagined and how were its citizens/subjects imagined as belonging to the nation in commercial fiction about race relations at this time; and second, how do stories of intimacy – mostly cis, heterosexual romance – shape these narratives of difference and national belonging? The chapter answers these questions using textual analysis and theories of difference.
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