The Australian Home-Front Novel of the Second World War: Genre, Gender and Region

Abstract

Discusses manifestations of the home-front novel established and exemplified by Dymphna Cusack and Florence James's Come In Spinner: populist in aspiration and style, focussed on a female-dominated workplace, and portraying a city transformed by, yet almost hermetically sealed off from, the military conflict to the north.' These novels 'have at their centre a version of the Australian wartime city that offers a significant variation on literary convention, and in particular on a strong tradition of pastoral (and anti-pastoral) in war literature. Closely related to the foregrounding of the urban in these works are issues of gender and sexuality, as the wartime city serves both as a counterpoint to the masculine world of the military and as a space that offers new possibilities, and dangers, for young women.'