Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity

Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity
Author: Brigid Rooney
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2018-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1783088168

‘Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ investigates the interaction between suburbs and suburbia in a century-long series of Australian novels. It puts the often trenchantly anti-suburban rhetoric of fiction in dialogue with its evocative and imaginative rendering of suburban place and time. ‘Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity’ rethinks existing cultural debates about suburbia – in Australia and elsewhere – by putting novelistic representations of ‘suburbs’ (suburban interiors, homes, streets, forms and lives over time) in dialogue with the often negative idea of ‘suburbia’ in fiction as an amnesic and conformist cultural wasteland. ‘Suburban space, the novel and Australian modernity’ shows, in other words, how Australian novels dramatize the collision between the sensory terrain of the remembered suburb and the cultural critique of suburbia. It is through such contradictions that novels create resonant mental maps of place and time. Australian novels are a prism through which suburbs – as sites of everyday colonization, defined by successive waves of urban development – are able to be glimpsed sidelong.

The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel

The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel
Author: Nicholas Birns
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2023-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009099507

The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of the novel in Australia. The chapters of this book survey significant issues and developments in the Australian novel, offer historical and conceptual frameworks, and provide vivid and original examples of what reading an Australian novel looks like in practice. The book begins with novels by literary visitors to Australia and concludes with those by refugees. In between, the reader encounters the Australian novel in its splendid contradictoriness, from nineteenth-century settler fiction by women writers through to literary images of the Anthropocene, from sexuality in the novels of Patrick White to Waanyi writer Alexis Wright's call for a sovereign First Nations literature. This book is an invitation to students, instructors, and researchers alike to expand and broaden their knowledge of the complex histories and crucial present of the Australian novel.

Bungalow Modernity

Bungalow Modernity
Author: Mary Lou Emery
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2020-06-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 147664070X

Despite its cozy image, the bungalow in literature and film is haunted by violence even while fostering possibilities for personal transformation, utopian social vision and even comedy. Originating in Bengal and adapted as housing for colonialist ventures worldwide, the homes were sold in mail-order kits during the "bungalow mania" of the early 20th century and enjoyed a revival at century's end. The bungalow as fictional setting stages ongoing contradictions of modernity--home and homelessness, property and dispossession, self and other--prompting a rethinking of our images of house and home. Drawing on the work of writers, architects and film directors, including Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, Amitav Ghosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, Willa Cather, Buster Keaton and Walter Mosley, this study offers new readings of the transcultural bungalow.

The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel

The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel
Author: David Carter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 826
Release: 2023-05-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009093207

The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel is an authoritative volume on the Australian novel by more than forty experts in the field of Australian literary studies, drawn from within Australia and abroad. Essays cover a wide range of types of novel writing and publishing from the earliest colonial period through to the present day. The international dimensions of publishing Australian fiction are also considered as are the changing contours of criticism of the novel in Australia. Chapters examine colonial fiction, women's writing, Indigenous novels, popular genre fiction, historical fiction, political novels, and challenging novels on identity and belonging from recent decades, not least the major rise of Indigenous novel writing. Essays focus on specific periods of major change in Australian history or range broadly across themes and issues that have influenced fiction across many years and in many parts of the country.

Creativity from Suburban Nowheres

Creativity from Suburban Nowheres
Author: Ilja Van Damme
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2023-07-26
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1487537956

Looking at suburbs as places of creativity gives rise to novel and thought-provoking narratives that typically run counter to the idea that suburbs are sites of "ordinary," "mundane," and "everyday" practices. Far from being geographies of "nowhere" – dull, materialistic, and monotone – suburbs are unpacked as being heterogeneous and historically layered places of living, work, and creation. Situating creativity in place and time, Creativity from Suburban Nowheres displaces mainstream understandings of creativity and widespread stereotypes commonly associated with the suburbs. Contributors explore the particular forms of creativity that suburbs elicit both in the process of their making, materialization, and community construction, and in the myriad ways in which suburbs are inhabited and experienced. They highlight accounts of suburbs as places that give people the space and latitude to shape individual and collective identities through creative practices at odds with mainstream culture, and often remote from the classic agglomeration "assets" associated with inner cities. Anchored in historical and geographical research, this volume highlights how and in what forms creativity should be understood in the suburbs, why and when creativity can be found, and how the notion of suburban creativity overthrows ingrained and dominant normative viewpoints. Rather than seeing creativity arise despite its suburban location, Creativity from Suburban Nowheres illuminates the emancipatory potential of suburbs for creativity.

Gerald Murnane

Gerald Murnane
Author: Professor Anthony Uhlmann FAHA
Publisher: Sydney University Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2020-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1743326947

Gerald Murnane is one of Australia’s most important contemporary authors, but for years was neglected by critics. In 2018 the New York Times described him as “the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of” and tipped him as a future Nobel Prize winner. Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One coincides with a renewed interest in his work. It includes an important new essay by Murnane himself, alongside chapters by established and emerging literary critics from Australia and internationally. Together they provide a stimulating reassessment of Murnane’s diverse body of work.

The Cambridge Companion to the City in World Literature

The Cambridge Companion to the City in World Literature
Author: Ato Quayson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2023-07-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1316517888

This book addresses the way cities have given rise to key aesthetic dispositions that are central to debates in World Literature.

The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature

The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature
Author: Jessica Gildersleeve
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 669
Release: 2020-12-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000281701

In recent years, Australian literature has experienced a revival of interest both domestically and internationally. The increasing prominence of work by writers like Christos Tsiolkas, heightened through television and film adaptation, as well as the award of major international prizes to writers like Richard Flanagan, and the development of new, high-profile prizes like the Stella Prize, have all reinvigorated interest in Australian literature both at home and abroad. This Companion emerges as a part of that reinvigoration, considering anew the history and development of Australian literature and its key themes, as well as tracing the transition of the field through those critical debates. It considers works of Australian literature on their own terms, as well as positioning them in their critical and historical context and their ethical and interactive position in the public and private spheres. With an emphasis on literature’s responsibilities, this book claims Australian literary studies as a field uniquely positioned to expose the ways in which literature engages with, produces and is produced by its context, provoking a critical re-evaluation of the concept of the relationship between national literatures, cultures, and histories, and the social function of literary texts.

Patrick White's Theatre

Patrick White's Theatre
Author: Denise Varney
Publisher: Sydney University Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2021-09-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1743327560

“Varney combines a theoretically astute sense of the hybridity of the dramatic event, with a dense but lucidly rendered sociological history of White’s plays as they progress through different productions, revivals, and receptions … This is an essential insight, and one which could be usefully extended to White’s novels, and perhaps to Australian modernism broadly.” - Jonathan Dunk, Australian Book Review One of the giants of Australian literature and the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White received less acclaim when he turned his hand to playwriting. In Patrick White’s Theatre, Denise Varney offers a new analysis of White’s eight published plays, discussing how they have been staged and received over a period of 60 years. From the sensational rejection of The Ham Funeral by the Adelaide Festival in 1962 to 21st-century revivals incorporating digital technology, these productions and their reception illustrate the major shifts that have taken place in Australian theatre over time. Varney unpacks White’s complex and unique theatrical imagination, the social issues that preoccupied him as a playwright, and his place in the wider Australian modernist and theatrical traditions.