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Introduction: Writing a City Built on Water

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Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism

Part of the book series: Literary Urban Studies ((LIURS))

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Abstract

How did writers represent Sydney at a time of rapid civic development and cultural change? This introduction positions the study’s focus texts within the complex and sometimes combative discourses of modernity that animated Sydney during the interwar period, showing how writers assess, reflect and contest these discourses by writing the city through its water. The introduction puts forward a model of ‘regional’ or localised modernism that affords opportunities to engage with aesthetic, thematic and formal responses to modernity understood as a phenomenon that is both situated and transcalar, conceptual and embodied.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Photographs and descriptions of the parade can be seen in The Home 18, no 3 (1938).

  2. 2.

    See also Mentz, ‘Towards a Blue Cultural Studies’ (2009b).

  3. 3.

    In Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture (2019), Paul Giles investigates Eleanor Dark’s interest in nested and tensile timescales with reference to her wide reading of modernists including Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce (2019: 200–201). Giles argues that Waterway ‘consciously imitates’ a Joycean model of ‘heterodox … chronometry’, claiming that the novel takes its title from the ‘Hades’ section of Ulysses; specifically, the line ‘“On the slow weedy waterway he had floated on his raft coastward over Ireland”’ (201; qtd. 208). Giles argues that Waterway is ‘fundamentally’ a novel of ‘planetary space’ and ‘planetary time’ (209). However, without tracing the intervening fractures of region, nation and empire, this seems an exclusively Anglophone planet of unidirectional movement from the canonical centre to the imitative periphery.

  4. 4.

    The complete archive of The Home has been digitised by the National Library of Australia and is free to view via Trove at http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-362409353.

  5. 5.

    In Waterway, see, for example, 12, 186, 383, 238. See also ‘Caroline Chisholm’ (1988).

  6. 6.

    See Innes (2003) for discussion of the future-history utopia as employed by Shaw and Wells.

  7. 7.

    In 1999, Tyrus Miller developed the framework of ‘late modernism’, challenging 1945 as the accepted endpoint of modernism and the idea of the thirties as a literary no-man’s land.

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  1. University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Meg Brayshaw

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Brayshaw, M. (2021). Introduction: Writing a City Built on Water. In: Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism. Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64426-0_1

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