An Expatriated Adventurer: Charmian Clift and the Utopian Possibility
Here I discuss Peel Me a Lotus, together with selections of journalistic output post-1965 and drafts of unpublished work (1962 and 1968), to demonstrate Clift's consistent return to dreams of personal and social betterment while at the same time her interest in autobiography remained in an ...
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| Published in: | Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature : JASAL 2019-01, Vol.19 (1), p.1-9 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Here I discuss Peel Me a Lotus, together with selections of journalistic output post-1965 and drafts of unpublished work (1962 and 1968), to demonstrate Clift's consistent return to dreams of personal and social betterment while at the same time her interest in autobiography remained in an 'unfinished state,' a situation that Bloch identifies as part of his understanding of utopian thinking (309). According to Sayre travel literature is a 'source of utopian writing' (27) so Clift's utopian sensibility in much of the work from Hydra was not unusual. The Commonwealth Literary Fund fellowship of 1968 was granted to produce a work of fiction and Clift clearly wanted to return to this project but by 1968 there was also a wider market for her work in other genres: her television adaptation of My Brother Jack had been well received and the syndication of her essays for newspapers and magazines had made her a household name. Clift and Johnston were not the only writers who were entranced by Hydra but Clift was distinctive in her representation of the expatriate experience, the aesthetics of the landscape, and the realities of the everyday during a period of cultural change following World War Two. |
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| ISSN: | 1447-8986 1833-6027 |