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image of person or book cover 2365532640539289516.jpg
Image courtesy of publisher's website.
y separately published work icon Spirit of Progress single work   novel  
Is part of Glenroy Series Steven Carroll , 2001 series - author novel (number 4 in series)
Issue Details: First known date: 2011... 2011 Spirit of Progress
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The thing that makes you, it never goes

A sleek high-speed train glides silently through the French countryside, bearing Michael, an Australian writer, and his travelling world of memory and speculation.

Melbourne, 1946, calls to him: the pressure cooker of the city during World War II has produced a small creative miracle, and at this pivotal moment the lives of his newly married parents, a group of restless artists, a proud old woman with a tent for a home, a journalist, a gallery owner, a farmer and a factory developer irrevocably intersect. And all the while the Spirit of Progress, the locomotive of the new age, roars through their lives like time′s arrow, pointing to the future and the post-war world only some of them will enter.' (Publisher's blurb)

Notes

  • Prequel to The Art of the Engine Driver, the first book in the Glenroy Trilogy.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Pymble, Turramurra - Pymble - St Ives area, Sydney Northern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,: Fourth Estate , 2011 .
      image of person or book cover 2365532640539289516.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 347p.
      Note/s:
      • Publication date: August 2011
      ISBN: 9780732291181 (pbk.)
VIEW PUBLICATION DETAILS FOR ALL VERSIONS ()

Other Formats

  • Also sound recording.
  • Large print.
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Works about this Work

Poetry, Imagery and Time Dennis Haskell , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , November vol. 5 no. 2 2015; 'This paper discusses the value of ekphrastic poetry through focussing on one key issue that comes into debates about it: the concept of Time. The paper begins with a brief history and analysis of the links and contrasts between poetry and painting – from Horace and Simonides through Lessing and Kant to the modern period. In doing so it also recounts differing views in the philosophy of Time. Authors whose literary works are discussed include T. S. Eliot, Kenneth Slessor and Stephen Carroll, and the author also considers one of his own ekphrastic poems, whose starting point is a painting by the Italian, Giorgio Morandi. The paper argues for a pragmatic approach to the concept of Time and for a view of ekphrastic poetry as a conversation between poetry and painting, rather than an argument. ' (Publication abstract)
Colonising Time : Steven Carroll’s Reinvention of Suburbia Brigid Rooney , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 13 no. 2 2013; 'Suburbia is a familiar topos in Australian fiction. Its address to colonisation is mostly oblique, yielded through its focus on the inauthenticity and restlessness of a settler modernity typically sourced in the white Anglo culture of pre 1970s decades. Yet the actual suburbs of postwar Australia are multiplicitous and shifting, always in tension with the imagined terrain of fictional suburbia. My paper explores literary suburbs as constituted by a complex set of orientations towards the real and the imagined. It reads the ways that Steven Carroll’s fictional suburbia indexes real world localities, while simultaneously serving as locus for reinvention of the novel in Australia, through forms of interior consciousness and temporality affiliated with European models of literary modernism. In Spirit of Progress (2011), Carroll's narrative engages with classic Anglo-Australian suburbia as a representational field, working with and against the real of history, even as it mines the seam of suburbia as a site of both colonization and forgetting, and of longing and return.' (Author's abstract)
The Year's Best (Overlooked) Books Brian McFarlane , 2012-2013 single work column
— Appears in: Inside Story , December - January no. 13 2012-2013; (p. 20)
A Portrait of Melbourne Nathanael O'Reilly , 2012 single work review
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 26 no. 1 2012; (p. 106-107)
— Review of Spirit of Progress Steven Carroll , 2011 single work novel
Miles Franklin Longlist Has Room for Both Genders Susan Wyndham , 2012 single work column
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 29 March 2012; (p. 5)
Life, Love and the Butterfly Effect Geordie Williamson , 2011 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 30 -31 July 2011; (p. 18-19)
— Review of Spirit of Progress Steven Carroll , 2011 single work novel
Portraits of a Tender Time Brian McFarlane , 2011 single work review
— Appears in: The Saturday Age , 30 July 2011; (p. 26-27)
— Review of Spirit of Progress Steven Carroll , 2011 single work novel
Cover Notes Lucy Sussex , 2011 single work review
— Appears in: The Sunday Age , 31 July 2011; (p. 21)
— Review of Spirit of Progress Steven Carroll , 2011 single work novel
Goodbye to All That Peter Pierce , 2011 single work review
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 30 July 2011; (p. 25)
— Review of Spirit of Progress Steven Carroll , 2011 single work novel
[Review] Spirit of Progress Clive Tilsley , 2011 single work review
— Appears in: Bookseller + Publisher Magazine , July vol. 91 no. 1 2011; (p. 24)
— Review of Spirit of Progress Steven Carroll , 2011 single work novel
Author Gets to Know His Eccentric Aunt Katherine Gia Metherell , 2011 single work column
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 14 March 2011; (p. 2)
Steven Carroll Tim Elliott , 2011 single work biography
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 30-31 July 2011; (p. 32-33)
Life in the Frame Bron Sibree , 2011 single work column
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 13 August 2011; (p. 23)
Miles Franklin Longlist Has Room for Both Genders Susan Wyndham , 2012 single work column
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 29 March 2012; (p. 5)
The Year's Best (Overlooked) Books Brian McFarlane , 2012-2013 single work column
— Appears in: Inside Story , December - January no. 13 2012-2013; (p. 20)
VIEW ALL WORKS ABOUT (17)

Awards

VIEW ALL AWARDS (2)
Last amended 3 Feb 2025 14:32:58
Subjects:
Settings:
  • Nunawading, Blackburn - Mitcham - Vermont area, Melbourne - East, Melbourne, Victoria,
  • Urban,
  • 1946-1977
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