Judith Wright and Frank Scott: gendering modernist networks in Australia and Canada

The works of Frank Scott (1899-1985) and Judith Wright (1915-2000) are analysed. Both came from comparable class backgrounds and are identified within literary criticism as poetic modernists. Both wrote critically on modernism and occupied somewhat analogous positions in Canada and Australia respectively, as writers, public intellectuals and political activists. A brief discussion that is useful in bringing into view the slippage between the private and the public, a tension which feminist theory persistently drags into the frame of literary criticism is presented.