Amazon.com description: Product Description: A study which describes the relations between women's fiction and poetry and feminist theories of cultural change in Australia. It concentrates on the historical period which saw the entry of women into citizenship, the federation of the colonies, urbanization and the beginnings of industrialization, the transition to social democracy and the Great War. The author's main concern is with women as agents of cultural change, as writing subjects. In relation to this aspect of the book, she develops a critical analysis of the processes by which women's writing has been elided from dominant accounts of this period in Australian cultural life. Her discussion focuses on the way European women writers in the Australian colonies deal with contemporary discourses on gender, nation and racial difference within the context of a settler society.