Judith Wright and Emily Carr: Gendered Colonial Modernity

Knitting together two fascinating but entirely distinct lives, this ingeniously structured braided biography tells the story of the lives and work of two women, each a cultural icon in her own country yet lesser known in the other's. Australian poet Judith Wright and Canadian painter Emily Carr broke new ground for female artists in the British colonies and influenced the political and social debates about environment and indigenous rights that have shaped Australia and Canada in the 21st century. In telling their story/ies, this book charts the battle for recognition of their modernist art and vision, pointing out significant moments of similarity in their lives and work. Although separated by thousands of miles, their experience of colonial modernity was startlingly analogous, as white settler women bent on forging artistic careers in a male-dominated world and sphere rigged against them. Through all this, though, their cultural importance endures; two remarkable women whose poetry and painting still speak to us today of their passionate belief in the transformative power of art.

Anne Collett is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She has published widely on postcolonial poetry with particular focus on women's writing from Australia, Canada and the Caribbean. She has published most recently in the area of environmental humanities across the 19th to 21st centuries. A/Prof Collett edited Kunapipi: journal of postcolonial writing from 1999-2012 – an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to creative and scholarly work on literature, culture, visual and performative arts. (See https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/).

Dorothy Jones is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She studied at the universities of Otago (NZ) Adelaide (Australia) and Oxford and is an honorary fellow in the Faculty of Law, Humanities and The Arts at the University of Wollongong. She has published widely in the area of postcolonial literature with special emphasis on women writers .

David Tucker is Associate Professor of Defense Analysis and Co-Director of the Center on Terrorism and Irregular Warfare at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, USA. He has served in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict as the Deputy Director for Special Operations and as a Foreign Service Officer in Africa and Europe. He is the author of many books and articles.

Erik Tonning is Professor of English at NLA University College, Norway, and Professor II of British Literature and Culture at the University of Bergen, Norway. He is co-editor of the Modernist Archives series and the Historicizing Modernism series, both published by Bloomsbury. He is the author of Samuel Beckett's Abstract Drama and Modernism and Christianity, as well as the editor of a number of volumes on modernism.

Matthew Feldman is Emeritus Professor in the Modern History of Ideas, Professional Fellow at the University of York, UK.