4 - Transnational Optics

Summary

This chapter asks what challenges the cartographic imaginary of literary nationalism might present to readers of three representative novels of the pre-Federation era: two of Ada Cambridge’s novels serialised at the time of Melbourne’s Centennial International Exhibition in 1888, A Black Sheep (later published as A Marked Man) and A Woman’s Friendship, and Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl (1890). The aim is to wrest these late colonial texts back from the moment of Federation and its continental scale, relocating them once more in that earlier time, before the nation, whose cartographic imaginary was intra- and inter-colonial rather than national, albeit located within broader transnational or trans-imperial horizons. The point is to see the work of these late colonial writers not through the singular lens of literary nationalism, as harbingers of a unified national ethos, but as evidence of what historian Alan Atkinson has called the ’jigsaw work’ of Federation, with its multiple scales of knowable community and its two-way mirrors of transnational identity formation.