Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Prologue
- One Modernism and Nationalism
- Two Literary Conflicts and Failed Vision
- Three The Community of Overland
- Four Conspiring for Freedom
- Five The Mission of Quadrant
- Six Cold War on Writing
- Seven Proprietors at War
- Eight New Little Magazines
- Nine Opening the Pages
- Ten From Rhetoric to Eloquence
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Index
Three - The Community of Overland
Lambert, Morrison, Waten, Hewett and Martin
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Prologue
- One Modernism and Nationalism
- Two Literary Conflicts and Failed Vision
- Three The Community of Overland
- Four Conspiring for Freedom
- Five The Mission of Quadrant
- Six Cold War on Writing
- Seven Proprietors at War
- Eight New Little Magazines
- Nine Opening the Pages
- Ten From Rhetoric to Eloquence
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Index
Summary
For Overland, as for its progenitors and contemporaries in the Realist Writers Groups, a free, democratic and socialist Australia was the logical fulfilment of a tradition of radical nationalism that went back to the 1890s. This belief implied a commitment to social realist literature that would reflect the conditions of the ordinary Australian, and particularly of the Australian male. The journal never however allowed this commitment to degenerate into the sectarian exclusion of work that failed to satisfy the current thinking of Party leaders or its own understanding of political correctness. As Stephen Murray-Smith later wrote,
We are not particularly interested in stories-with-a-social-message. We think messages emerge through well-written stories with good insight into people. Generally speaking we would favor stories with some kind of humanist content and not too mannered, and we wouldn't publish, of course, racist (for instance) material however well put together.
This inclusive policy, valuing literature for its humanist insight rather than for purely formal characteristics, and at the same time recognizing that writing nevertheless has non-literary consequences, was the basis of both Overland's politics and its aesthetic. It implies a community based on tolerance, openness and intellectual curiosity – essential qualities if socialism is to be democratic.
During the Cold War Overland provided one of the few places where literary and political debate across the whole range of the left was able to continue the task of reinterpreting the Australian tradition in order to produce the circumstances for a free and independent Australia.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Writing in Hope and FearLiterature as Politics in Postwar Australia, pp. 55 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996