Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity

Brigid Rooney

Description

A study of how Australian novels dramatize the collision between the sensory terrain of the remembered suburb and the cultural critique of suburbia.

‘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.

Acknowledgements; Introduction: Things to Do with Suburbia; Part 1 Pre-1945 Suburbia; Chapter One Bungalow Modernism: D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo; Chapter Two Breaking the Iron Circle: Women Writing the Suburbs, 1917–1944; Part 2 Mid- Century Suburbia; Chapter Three Frontier Suburb, Interior Modernity: Patrick White’s The Tree of Man; Chapter Four The Long Remove: Expatriate Visions of Suburbia; Chapter Five Electric Suburbia: Reverberations and Legacies of Shock in Women’s Fiction; Part 3 Post- Suburbia; Chapter Six Reflex, Reflection, Revision: Post- Suburban Novels; Chapter Seven Outer Suburban Tales; Chapter Eight Suburban Globe: Homing Strangers, Estranging Home; Coda; Chapter Nine Refractions of Suburbia in Alexis Wright’s, The Swan Book; Notes; Works Cited; Index.

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783088164
• Langue: English

Extrait

Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity
ANTHEM STUDIES IN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture specialises in quality, innovative research in Australian literary studies. The series publishes work that advances contemporary scholarship on Australian literature conceived historically, thematically and/or conceptually. We welcome well-researched and incisive analyses on a broad range of topics: from individual authors or texts to considerations of the field as a whole, including in comparative or transnational frames.
Series Editors
Katherine Bode – Australian National University, Australia
Nicole Moore – University of New South Wales, Australia
Editorial Board
Tanya Dalziell – University of Western Australia, Australia
Delia Falconer – University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
John Frow – University of Sydney, Australia
Wang Guanglin – Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, China
Ian Henderson – King’s College London, UK
Tony Hughes-D’Aeth – University of Western Australia, Australia
Ivor Indyk – University of Western Sydney, Australia
Nicholas Jose – University of Adelaide, Australia
James Ley – Sydney Review of Books , Australia
Andrew McCann – Dartmouth College, USA
Lyn McCredden – Deakin University, Australia
Elizabeth McMahon – University of New South Wales, Australia
Susan Martin – La Trobe University, Australia
Brigitta Olubas – University of New South Wales, Australia
Anne Pender – University of New England, Australia
Fiona Polack – Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
Sue Sheridan – University of Adelaide, Emeritus, Australia
Ann Vickery – Deakin University, Australia
Russell West-Pavlov – Eberhard Karls Universitat Tubingen, Germany
Lydia Wevers – Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Gillian Whitlock – University of Queensland, Australia
Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity
Brigid Rooney
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
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© Brigid Rooney 2018

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-814-0 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-814-1 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
Dedicated to the memory of Barbara and Elizabeth Rooney, and for my family.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Things to Do with Suburbia
Part 1 Pre-1945 Suburbia
Chapter One
Bungalow Modernism: D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo
Chapter Two
Breaking the Iron Circle: Women Writing the Suburbs, 1917–1944
Part 2 Mid-Century Suburbia
Chapter Three
Frontier Suburb, Interior Modernity: Patrick White’s The Tree of Man
Chapter Four
The Long Remove: Expatriate Visions of Suburbia
Chapter Five
Electric Suburbia: Reverberations and Legacies of Shock in Women’s Fiction
Part 3 Post-Suburbia
Chapter Six
Reflex, Reflection, Revision: Post-Suburban Novels
Chapter Seven
Outer Suburban Tales
Chapter Eight
Suburban Globe: Homing Strangers, Estranging Home
Coda
Chapter Nine
Refractions of Suburbia in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book
Notes
Works Cited
Index
ACKNOWLEDGeMENTS
My journey through real and fictional suburbs has sometimes been arduous but mostly joyful. The resulting book would have been impossible without the guidance and support – intellectual, material, emotional – of friends and family, as well as colleagues at the University of Sydney and in the field of Australian literary studies.
I am indebted to the University of Sydney for the generous assistance provided by a Thompson Equity Fellowship in 2015 that freed me to think and write at just the right time. I am the recipient of much-needed support through grants and periods of study leave for which I thank the School of Literature, Art and Media, and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. I owe thanks to colleagues in the Department of English and its Australian Literature Program for a lively intellectual environment and for myriad forms of advice and support.
I have a number of people to thank for their patient, critical feedback on my work-in-progress. Thanks to Monique Rooney, my abiding reader of first resort whose critical and creative responses I cannot do without. I am hugely grateful to colleagues and friends who have read and responded to drafts at various stages – especially to Leigh Dale, Guy Davidson, Robert Dixon, Paul Genoni, Paul Giles, Peter Kirkpatrick, Elizabeth McMahon, Peter Marks, Liam Semler, Angela Seward, Susan Sheridan, Lee Wallace and Elizabeth Webby. Thanks also to Jacinta Van Den Berg for her excellent help as research assistant in this project’s early stages. For their astute feedback, advice and support I thank commissioning editors of the Anthem Series in Australian Literature and Culture, Katherine Bode and Nicole Moore. Over the years, anonymous peer reviewers and respondents at seminars and conferences have provided insightful comments on my contributions to journals, edited collections and books; I am grateful to the editors of those collections whose comments have contributed, knowingly or not, to the present book: Richard Begam, Coral Howells, Michael Valdez Moses and Brigitta Olubas. To my students in English and Australian literature at the University of Sydney with whom I have talked about suburbia for more years than I like to admit, I have learned much from your observations, insights and enthusiasm.
I am grateful to Anthem Press for agreeing to publish this book, and for the assistance, advice and help of Abi Pandey, Nisha and the Anthem team. I am especially appreciative of the careful labours of Fergus Armstrong who lent his editorial expertise. I thank the artist Ian Strange and his producer and professional assistant Jedda Andrews for kind permission to use Number Twelve from the wonderful series Final Act for the book’s cover image.
I owe the greatest debt to my family. I dedicate this book to my late mother, Isabel Barbara (Han) Rooney, without whose spirit, creative intelligence and wisdom it could never have been imagined, let alone written. I have drawn inspiration from the wit, gentleness and courage of my father Maurice, from my late sister, Elizabeth (Liz), whose gifts remain and whose light shines on, from her beautiful daughters Miranda and Lily, and from all my nieces and nephews – not least from their parents, my brothers and sisters, with whom I share memories of our growing up together in a succession of suburban homes. I thank my sons, Robin and Jeremy, for living contemporary suburbia with me, for being tuned in, for bringing coffee and encouragement, music and distraction. Last but not least, thank you, John – not just for the occasional rant, but for your kindness, goodness, forbearance and love.
INTRODUCTION: THINGS TO DO WITH SUBURBIA

How do those of us who live in suburbs, and most Australians do, relate to our neighbourhoods? Are they places which, physically and mentally, we are trying to get away from? Do we drive through them each morning and evening, to and from work, our eyes fixed upon the car in front, upon straying pedestrians and traffic lights? Have we seen where we live? Has it entered our imagination?
—Bernard Smith, ‘On Perceiving the Australian Suburb’ 1
My regular exercise is a forty-minute circuit through suburban streets. When I walk this route, daydreaming or distracted by music or podcasts, the roads I cross, the gardens, houses and parklands I pass are slightly out of focus. There is the tangible, three-dimensional world to enjoy – the morning atmosphere, the humidity of late summer or the chill of winter, the overarching dome of dawn skies or the pale moon hanging low in the west over remnant bushland through which roars the hidden freeway that now bisects the suburb. Though I know every letterbox, every front garden, the style and condition of every house, every crack in the pavement, the burly gang of cockatoos that hangs out on a particular roof, and my fellow walkers and their greetings, the circuit always furnishes some never-before-seen detail. The daily walk, however, has lately served notice that the suburb’s times are changing. Its mostly 1960s houses – modernist or vernacular three-bedroom brick veneers – are ageing. Their original owners, their families grown and departed, are elderly, many already gone or in the process of moving on. A new population is altering the composition and contours of the neighbourhood. Not without a pang I observe as one by one their houses are demolished, as once careful