Mixing It Up: Poetry for The Goose

Poetry Editorial by Camilla Nelso

Beyond Prometheus: Creativity, discourse, ideology and the Anthropocene

This article considers the strange confluence of the rhetoric of creativity and commerce at key points across the “Great Acceleration”. It argues that although the idea of creativity has its most common contemporary expression in art, it does not in fact emerge from the discourse of art. Rather, the idea of creativity as a specifically human possession emerges from the discourse of nature at the end of the eighteenth century, and particularly in the proliferation of natural scientific ideas about “natural creation”. It argues that if a global response to climate change necessitates a more enlightened remaking of ideas, industries and communities, then one of the ideas that must be “remade” is the Promethean aspect of the idea of creativity, and the relationship it articulates between human beings and the planetary environment we inhabit

The Polymers by Adam Dickinson

Review of The Polymers by Adam Dickinson

Rag Cosmology by Erin Robinsong

Review of Erin Robinsong\u27s Rag Cosmology

Poetry Editorial: Seeing Words

Poetry Editorial by Camilla Nelso

Poetry Editorial: Audioecopoetics

Poetry Editorial by Camilla Nelso

The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism edited by Greg Garrard

Camilla Nelson reviews The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrar

‘There is no Original Creative Power in the Place’:* Creativity and Colonial Anxiety

‘The Englishman possesses eminently the deductive and comparative faculty, and the organ of creativity,’ wrote the British academic turned colonial politician C.H. Pearson in 1859, in one of the earliest appearances of the abstract English noun ‘creativity’ in a published work. This paper investigates the concept of creativity as it was deployed in the cultural and economic fields of the nineteenth century, with particular attention to the relationship between the British metropolis and Australian colony. It examines the mobilisation of the term in diverse fields, including education, commerce and empire-building, by capitalists and workers, colonizers and colonized, in their strategic manuoevrings across the social structures of the time. It takes inspiration from Bourdieu by seeking to understand the ways in which the term functions as both a claim to symbolic power and as a source of mystification that is generally — though not always — used to give distinction to the experience, perspectives and material productions of the privileged. The paper is part of a larger project that challenges the traditional historical narrative that locates the origins of the discourse of creativity in the art of the Renaissance and/or Romantic eras by exposing the specifically modern preconditions for the emergence of the new term. * South Australian Register, 30 December 186

The invention of creativity: the emergence of a discourse

Creativity is increasingly cited as the key to social and economic change in the 21st century. It is also a very modern concept — making its first appearance as an English noun in 1875. This paper investigates the cultural construction of creativity in the context of the history of ideas. It understands creativity not as a given human attribute or ability, but as an idea that emerges out of specific historical moments, shaped by the discourses of politics, science, commerce, and nation. It shifts the ground of analysis away from the naturalised models that have traditionally dominated the field of creative practice research, in order to highlight the historicity of a concept that is more commonly deemed to be without history