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A.A. Phillips on The Cultural Cringe

MUP Masterworks #6

A.A. Phillips

Melbourne writer, critic and teacher A.A. Phillips coined the memorable term ‘the cultural cringe’ to describe an Australian tendency to identify our literature and art as inferior to work produced overseas, particularly in Britain and the United States.

About this Title

‘We cannot shelter from invidious comparisons behind the barrier of a separate language; we have no long-established or interestingly different cultural tradition to give security and distinction to its interpreters; and the centrifugal pull of the great cultural metropolises works against us. Above our writers—and other artists-—looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon achievement. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the characteristic Australian Cultural Cringe. . .’

The Australian writer, critic and teacher A.A. Phillips coined the term ‘the cultural cringe’ in 1950 to describe an Australian tendency to identify our literature and art as inferior to work produced overseas, particularly in Britain and the United States. The term has resonated in debates about Australian culture, society and identity ever since.

Although Phillips’ famous essay on the cringe was first published more than fifty years ago, it remains a powerful reference point in discussions of the national culture. It is reprinted here with two of his other essays on Australian culture, and with additional biographical and critical material, including an essay by Ivor Indyk.

The MUP Masterworks series celebrates distinguished Australian writers and ideas. Other writers in the series include Manning Clark, Donald Horne, Janet McCalman, Ray Parkin and Brenda Niall.

About the Author

AA (Arthur Angell) Phillips was born in Melbourne in 1900 and died in 1985. He was educated at the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford, and was a schoolmaster at Wesley College, Melbourne. He published several books of criticism, including The Australian Tradition, and had a long association with Meanjin, in which his article about the cultural cringe first appeared.

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978-0-522-85221-9