Cooper, Melinda J.

Middlebrow Modernism Eleanor Dark's Interwar Fiction. - Sydney : Sydney University Press, (c)2022. - 1 online resource (291 pages). - Sydney Studies in Australian Literature Ser. .

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Intro -- Half title -- Title -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Introduction Middlebrow Modernism: Negotiating Settler-colonial Modernity, Regional Cosmopolitanism and Liberal Humanism -- Eleanor Dark and Interwar Australia -- Regional Cosmopolitanism -- Settler-colonial Modernity -- Eleanor Dark and the Transnational Turn -- Relational and Uneven -- Middlebrow Modernism -- Middlebrow Modernism in Interwar Australia -- Mapping Eleanor Dark's Middlebrow Modernism "Whether You Deal in Books or Peanut Brittle": Writing for the Popular Market in Eleanor Dark's 1920s Magazine Fiction and Slow Dawning (1932) -- Reframing Eleanor Dark's 1920s Fiction -- Technological Modernity -- The Modern Woman -- "The Ladies' Circulating Library": Eleanor Dark and Her Father -- "My Unspeakable Slow Dawning" -- A New Kind of Citizen: The Middle-class, Professional Woman -- The Changing Nature of Marriage and Romance -- Valerie and the "Army of Women": The Individual and the Collective -- The Technical Expert -- Race and Class -- Conclusion "A Masterpiece of Camouflage": Australian Modernism and Prelude to Christopher (1934) -- Reading Modernism and Modernity into Cultural Nationalism -- Eugenics, Modernism and the Modern Woman -- Stylistic Hybridity in Prelude to Christopher -- The Quarantined Island -- Prelude to Christopher and the Middlebrow -- Prelude to Christopher and Racial Otherness -- Conclusion: "Portrait of Linda" -- "Like the Lens of a Camera": Commercial Culture, Settler Belonging and Middlebrow Modernism in Return to Coolami (1936) -- Modernism and its Relations -- Return to Coolami and mass culture -- Settler Vision Modern(ist) Vision -- Seeing in Motion -- Adjusted Vision -- Middlebrow Modernist Time and Memory -- Modernist Timelessness -- Ambivalence About Modernity -- Conclusion -- "The Everlasting Voice of Man": Modernist Aesthetic Utopianism and Sun Across the Sky (1937) -- "Writers of the Individualistic and Liberalizing Type" -- Sun Across the Sky and the Artist -- Vitalism and Art -- Mass Civilisation -- The Middlebrow Cultural Critic -- Mapping the Community -- The Threat of the Global -- The Limits of Aesthetic Utopianism -- The Ethics of the Middlebrow Novel -- Conclusion "The Vast, the Bewildering, the Menacing Problems of all Humanity": Regional Cosmopolitanism and the Political Middlebrow in Waterway (1938) -- Cosmopolitan Humanism -- Regional Cosmopolitanism -- "Let's Go and Join the Revolution": Aesthetic Utopianism and Politics -- Ethical Encounters and the Face-to-face -- Aesthetic Utopianism and the Second World War -- Sydney Harbour and Interwar Modernity: "Haled With Glamour and Romance" -- "A Menace, a Terror, Death Waiting" -- Conclusion -- "An Exercise in Imagination": The Limits of Empathy in The Timeless Land (1941)



9781743328668 9781743328576


Dark, Eleanor, 1901-1985 --Criticism and interpretation.


Electronic Books.

PR9619 / .M533 2022