Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism

Description

This book examines literary representations of Sydney and its waterway in the context of Australian modernism and modernity in the interwar period. Then as now, Sydney Harbour is both an ecological wonder and ladened with economic, cultural, historical and aesthetic significance for the city by its shores. In Australia’s earliest canon of urban fiction, writers including Christina Stead, Dymphna Cusack, Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant and M. Barnard Eldershaw explore the myth and the reality of the city ‘built on water’. Mapping Sydney via its watery and littoral places, these writers trace impacts of empire, commercial capitalism, global trade and technology on the city, while drawing on estuarine logics of flow and blockage, circulation and sedimentation to innovate modes of writing temporally, geographically and aesthetically specific to Sydney’s provincial modernity. Contributing to the growing field of oceanic or aqueous studies, Sydney and its Waterway and Australian Modernism shows the capacity of water and human-water relations to make both generative and disruptive contributions to urban topography and narrative topology Acknowledgments Contents List of Figures 1 Introduction: Writing a City Built on Water Modernism in the Estuary Making Sydney Modern Tides of Progress, Tides of History Writing with the Waterway Works Cited 2 The Origins of Australian Urban Modernity: Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) Antinomies of Allegory: The Tank Stream Press The Death’s Head of Modernity: Michael Baguenault What History Is That; What Enigma Is That? Conclusion: Mourning Modernity Works Cited 3 Science, Everyday Experience and Modern Urban Women: Dymphna Cusack’s Jungfrau (1936) Writing ‘the Emerging City Type’ Modern Urban Woman and the Problem of Experience Modern Culture, Modern Space Serial Selves Dislocation, Death and the Absence of Direction Meta-Analysing the Modern Work Cited 4 Ecology, Urban Ethics and the Harbour: Eleanor Dark’s Waterway (1938) The Ethics of Vital Entanglement Taking the Democracy of the Beach to the City Negotiating Settler Modernity in Macquarie Place The artist’s Responsibility in a Vitalist Polity Crisis and Resolution on the Waterway Conclusion Works Cited 5 Plans, Porosity and the Possibilities of Urban Narrative: Kylie Tennant’s Foveaux (1939) Porosity and Possibility in Foveaux Competing Narratives of Urban Progress Renewal and Reclamation at 10 Paradise Street Conclusion Works Cited 6 The End of the City: M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947; 1983) Ruin and Phantasmagoria Ghost City of Paper Total War Necropolis Conclusion Works Cited 7 Conclusion: Sydney then and Now Works Cited Index