Time, tide and history : Eleanor Dark's fiction / edited by Fiona Morrison and Brigid Rooney.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Morrison, Fiona, editor.

Rooney, Brigid, editor.

Series:

Sydney studies in Australian literature.

Sydney studies in Australian literature

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

Dark, Eleanor.

Australian fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Australian fiction.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (312 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Sydney : Sydney University Press, 2024.

Summary:

Time, Tide and History: Eleanor Dark's Fiction is the first book-length edited collection of scholarly essays to treat the full span of Eleanor Dark's fiction, advancing a recent revival of critical and scholarly interest in Dark's writing. This volume not only establishes a new view of Dark's fiction as a whole, but also reflects on the ways in which her fiction speaks to our present moment, in the context of a globally fraught, post-pandemic, Anthropocene era. Above all, the revisiting of Dark's fiction is mandated by a desire to recognise the ways in which it anticipates vital debates in Australian literary and national culture today, about settler colonialism and its legacies, and with regard to the histories, condition and status of Australia's First Nations people. This volume interweaves varied topical themes, from formal debates about modernism, historical realism and melodrama, to questions about modernity's time and space, about gender and cultural difference, and about the specifics of built and natural environments. Time, Tide and History intentionally loosens the conventions of literary scholarship by including other kinds of work alongside critical and scholarly readings: a written dialogue between two contemporary historians about Dark's legacy, and a biographical piece on the life and role of Eleanor Dark's husband, Eric Payten Dark. Bringing together the interwar fiction's feminist and modernist dimensions with the historical turn of The Timeless Land trilogy, the essays in Time, Tide and History collectively pursue ethical and political questions while teasing out the distinctive thematic, formal and aesthetic features of Dark's fiction.

Contents:

Intro

Half title

Title

Acknowledgements

Table of Contents

Introduction: Time, Tide and History

Shifting Tides: Eleanor Dark's Writing and its Reception

Reading Dark's Modernism Now

Reading Dark's Historical Fiction Now

Conclusion

References

Modernity and Biography

Navigating Modernity: Eleanor Dark's Fiction

Introduction

Ambivalence About Modernity

Combined and Uneven

Anachronism and the Small-Scale

Remaining Human

Notes

Dr Eric Payten Dark: The Man Behind the Novelist

Reading Prelude to Christopher

"A Writer by Inheritance": Dowell O'Reilly's Literary Influence in Eleanor Dark's Prelude to Christopher and Waterway

Motherhood and the Maternal Instinct in the Early Fiction of Eleanor Dark

Slow Dawning

Prelude to Christopher

The Structural Limits to Dark's Feminism

"An Outstanding Study in Abnormal Psychology": "Pilgrimage" as the Precursor to Prelude to Christopher

Melancholia: An "abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief"99 Kristeva, Black Sun, 3.

"Pilgrimage": More than a "five finger exercise"3636 Eleanor Dark, "Pilgrimage" typed manuscript, Papers of Eleanor Dark, 1849-1980, MLMSS 4545, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, 3. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text. in Writing

"I'm wandering - I'm thinking mad things - mad, mad, mad!":5454 Eleanor Dark, Prelude to Christopher (Sydney: Halstead Press, 2011 [1934]), 29. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text. Prelude to Christopher as a Modernist Melancholic Text

Spiritual Vertigo: Illness, Affect and Modernity in Prelude to Christopher

Eleanor Dark and Australian Modernism.

Sick Nation: The Queer Disturbances of Prelude to Christopher

Modernist Ecopoetics, Vitalism and the Pastoral

Landscapes and Mindscapes: The Confluence of Modernism and Ecopoetics in Eleanor Dark's Return to Coolami

Connecting Water and Land: Revisiting Nationalism in the Vitalist Aesthetics of Eleanor Dark and Vance Palmer

Scales of Relation: Eleanor Dark's Waterway, the Aquatic Pastoral and Communal Mourning

Reading The Timeless Land

In Conversation: The Historical Imagination and Legacy of Eleanor Dark

Eleanor Dark as Historian

Time and Timelessness

Nature, Land and Australian Ecologies

The Context of the 1930s and 1940s

Changing Understandings of the Colony

Outlaws of History: Eleanor Dark's Trilogy of Nation

Eleanor Dark's the Timeless Land Trilogy as Anthropocene Narrative

Eleanor Dark's Chronotopes: Time and Narration in the Timeless Land Trilogy

"A Careless Sort of Benevolence": Melodrama and Critique in the Timeless Land Trilogy

Writing in a Time of Crisis

Reading The Little Company in Times of Crisis

Writing Australia at War

The Writer as Isolationist

The Writer as Educator

State Control

Contributors

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print record.

ISBN:

9781743329689

1743329687

9781743329672

1743329679

OCLC:

1435750859