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Works about this Work
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Friday Essay : ‘A Prisoner on the Rack’ – How 19th-century Australian Women Wrote about Marital Rape
2024
single work
column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 22 March 2024; -
Do Australian Modernisms Strike Back? Still Harping on ‘Margins’
2024
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Rethinking Peripheral Modernisms 2024; (p. 99-118)'New modernist studies problematise the term ‘modernism’, its uses and abuses, therefore views on non-hierarchical modernist constellations exemplify the “simultaneous uncontemporaneities” Patrick Williams expanded upon in 2000. The purported ‘belatedness’ of ‘other’ modernisms is predicated on such premises, with Oceania, and more specifically Australia, as a fertile case in question. By looking askance at peripheral modernisms, and thus trying to read against the grain of a stale and debatable centre/margin cultural divide, this paper investigates many received assumptions by focussing on two women writers who have both been marginally included under the ‘modernist umbrella’: Christina Stead, an Australian expatriate to both Britain and the US, and Eleanor Dark, who chose to remain unabashedly local. In particular, I investigate Waterway (1938) and Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), novels in which Dark and Stead portray the metropolitan fluidities of the capital city of a settler-state described by John Williams as a “quarantined culture”.' (Publication abstract)
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Women Writers and the Emerging Urban Novel, 1930-1952
2023
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023; -
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Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism
New York (City)
:
Palgrave Macmillan
,
2021
21207298
2021
multi chapter work
criticism
'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.'
Source : publisher's blurb
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News from Australia : Global Modernism Studies and the Case of Australian Modernism
2020
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature 2020; (p. 181-192)"One of the major developments in literary studies of the past two decades is the resurgence of interest in the discursive fields of both modernism and modernity. This chapter asks what the case of Australian modernism can offer to global modernism studies. In many ways, Australian modernism provides an exemplary illustration of the temporal, geographical, vertical, and aesthetic expansions theorised by the ‘new modernist’ studies. Yet Australian modernism can also point to some of the problems, blind spots, and elisions of expanded theorisations of modernism. By exploring examples from both settler and Indigenous art and literature, this chapter shows that the concepts produced in the metropolitan centres of modernism studies can be modified and made more nuanced by coming into contact with the complexities of a settler-colonial situation."
Source: Abstract.
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Waterways by Eleanor Dark
1946
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Women's Digest , November vol. 2 no. 11 1946; (p. 22-23)
— Review of Waterway 1938 single work novel -
Recent Books : Digest of the Month's Reading
1946
single work
review
— Appears in: The Australasian Book News and Library Journal , December vol. 1 no. 6 1946; (p. 261)
— Review of Six Times Six : Poems 1940-1949 selected work poetry ; Sun Across the Sky 1937 single work novel ; Waterway 1938 single work novel ; Return to Coolami 1936 single work novel -
Untitled
1947
single work
review
— Appears in: The Central Queensland Herald , 6 February 1947; (p. 5)
— Review of Waterway 1938 single work novel -
Untitled
1947
single work
review
— Appears in: The North Queensland Register , 22 March 1947; (p. 61)
— Review of Waterway 1938 single work novel -
A Sydney Day
1938
single work
review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 24 June no. 31350 1938; (p. 6)
— Review of Waterway 1938 single work novel -
'Book News' Arranges for Exhibit
1947
single work
column
— Appears in: The Australasian Book News and Library Journal , April vol. 1 no. 10 1947; (p. 443) Book News persuades the Department of Post War Reconstruction to include Australian literature in the Australian section of the British Empire Exhibition at the Royal Easter Show. Book News calls once more for a National Book League. -
Tragic Modernism in Eleanor Dark's 'Waterway'
2004
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Eucalypt , no. 3 2004; -
The Progress of Eleanor Dark
1951
single work
criticism
biography
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 12 no. 3 1951; (p. 139-148) -
y
Time and Memory in the Novels of Eleanor Dark
Kensington
:
2009
Z1596660
2009
single work
thesis
'In this thesis I will demonstrate that Eleanor Dark's over-riding themes are time and memory. Time informs the structure of her novels, she juxtaposes past and present. Memory in all its aspects, personal, cultural, racial dominates both her contemporary novels and The Timeless Land trilogy. The thesis considers Dark's fiction in sequence to chart her treatment oftime and memory.
'Simultaneously Dark was reaching into her own reservoir of memory and transfiguring her own experience in the characters, events and locations of her novels. In this oblique way, and through this unique form of modelling, Dark reveals little known areas of her life. Biographically Dark remains elusive; the surface events of her life are well documented but do not account for the drama of her character portrayals, the immediacy of her perceptions of the natural world, her deep intellectual responses to art, literature and politics, as well as her preoccupation with time.
'It is my contention that Dark's creative thrust was inwards; she developed the inner processes of memory and imagination. Time and memory cohere in her novels; under scrutiny they bring new interpretations to her work, and new insights into her life.' (Author's abstract)
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Spun from Four Horizons : Re-Writing the Sydney Harbour Bridge
2009
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , December vol. 33 no. 4 2009; (p. 417-429) 'The Sydney Harbour Bridge provides an imaginative space that is revisited by Australian writers in particular ways. In this space, novelists, poets, and cultural historians negotiate questions of emotional and psychological transformation as well as reflect on social and environmental change in the city of Sydney. The writerly tensions that mark these accounts often alter, or query, representations of the Bridge as a symbol of material progress and demonstrate a complex creative engagement with the Bridge. This discussion of 'the Bridge' focuses on the work of four authors, Eleanor Dark, P.R. Stephensen, Peter Carey and Vicki Hastrich and includes a range of other fictional and non-fictional accounts of 'Bridge-writing.' The ideas proffered are framed by a theorising of space, especially referencing the work of Michel de Certeau, whose writing on the spatial ambiguity of a bridge is important to the examination of the diverse ways in which Australian writers have engaged with the imaginative potential and almost mythic resonance of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.' (p. 417)
- Coast,
- Sydney, New South Wales,
- Watsons Bay, Sydney Eastern Harbourside, Sydney Eastern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,
- Urban,
