Description
Book Synopsis‘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.
Trade Review"Brigid Rooney’s Suburban Space, The Novel and Australian Modernity is a complex, fascinating study which tries to come to terms with the ambiguities and contradictions of these and other Australian tales of suburbia. This commendable book embraces a desire to restore dignity to the places and experiences that have come to shape the lives of Australian writers and poets – spheres that are often off the grid when compared to the metropolitan cores of Australia’s capital cities. Rooney’s careful scholarship and attention to detail is something to marvel at." — Suzie Gibson, Australian Literary Studies, Volume 35, No. 1. — 28 April 2020"
‘Brigid Rooney eloquently renders a dynamic vision of the suburb as a site in Australian literature, tracing the “seismic rifts and connections” between suburb and national image in writers ranging from Patrick White to Michelle de Kretser’
—Nicholas Birns, Associate Professor, School of Professional Studies, New York University, USA, and author of Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead.
‘At last: an authoritative book on the topic of the suburb in Australian fiction. […] Audacious in scope, broad in its philosophical connections, this is an indispensable text for scholars in Australian, literary and cultural studies’
—Gail Jones, Professor, Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University, Australia.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements; 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.
