Overview
- Shows the interaction of local and transnational myths in the development of urban narratives
- Engages with oceanic studies demonstrating how the waterway exerted forces of capitalism, global trade, technology, and the complex debts of colonialism
- Establishes an understanding of the Australian literary modernism that emerged in interwar Sydney
Part of the book series: Literary Urban Studies (LIURS)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
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
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Meg Brayshaw teaches and researches Australian literature. She holds a doctorate from Western Sydney University and serves on the editorial team of Australian Literary Studies. She lives on unceded Dharawal land.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Sydney and Its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism
Authors: Meg Brayshaw
Series Title: Literary Urban Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64426-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-64425-3Published: 02 February 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-64428-4Published: 03 February 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-64426-0Published: 01 February 2021
Series ISSN: 2523-7888
Series E-ISSN: 2523-7896
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 217
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, Literature, general, Literary Theory, Urban History, Imperialism and Colonialism