Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture

Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity
Brigid Rooney

A study of how Australian novels dramatize the collision between the sensory terrain of the remembered suburb and the cultural critique of suburbia.

Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity investigates the interaction between suburbs and suburbia in a century-long series of Australian novels. It puts the often trenchantly anti-suburban rhetoric of fiction in dialogue with its evocative and imaginative rendering of suburban place and time. 'Suburban space, the novel and Australian modernity' rethinks existing cultural debates about suburbia — in Australia and elsewhere — by putting novelistic representations of 'suburbs' (suburban interiors, homes, streets, forms and lives over time) in dialogue with the often negative idea of 'suburbia' in fiction as an amnesic and conformist cultural wasteland. 'Suburban space, the novel and Australian modernity' shows, in other words, how Australian novels dramatize the collision between the sensory terrain of the remembered suburb and the cultural critique of suburbia. It is through such contradictions that novels create resonant mental maps of place and time. Australian novels are a prism through which suburbs — as sites of everyday colonization, defined by successive waves of urban development — are able to be glimpsed sidelong.