The tendency to look overseas for great literary works is hardly new. The notion of ‘cultural cringe’ (coined by AA Phillips in 1950) describes an Australian assumption that ‘the domestic cultural product will be worse than the imported article’. We suppose it’s being done better internationally, and look to international markets as arbiters of taste. We measure our own successes against international works—both in terms of sales and reception—and maintain the baseline assumption that international work represents the highest level of achievement. Emmett Stinson charts the evolution of the cultural cringe in a more recent context, describing it as a […]