Time, Tide and History: Essays on the Writing of Eleanor Dark 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.
Edited by:
Fiona Morrison,
Brigid Rooney
Imprint: Sydney University Press
Country of Publication: Australia
Dimensions:
Height: 254mm,
Width: 178mm,
ISBN: 9781743329665
ISBN 10: 1743329660
Series: Sydney Studies in Australian Literature
Pages: 310
Publication Date: 01 July 2024
Audience:
General/trade
,
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
ELT Advanced
,
Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgements Introduction: Time, Tide and History by Fiona Morrison and Brigid Rooney Part 1. Modernity and Biography Chapter 1: Navigating Modernity: Eleanor Dark’s Fiction by Melinda J. Cooper Chapter 2: Dr Eric Payten Dark: The Man Behind the Novelist by Margo Beasley Part 2. Prelude to Christopher Chapter 3. “A Writer by Inheritance”: Dowell O’Reilly’s Literary Influence in Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher and Waterway by Morgan Burgess Chapter 4. Motherhood and the Maternal Instinct in the Early Fiction of Eleanor Dark by Anne Maxwell Chapter 5. “An Outstanding Study in Abnormal Psychology”: “Pilgrimage” as the Precursor to Prelude to Christopher by Alicia Gaffney Chapter 6. Spiritual Vertigo: Illness, Affect and Modernity in Prelude to Christopher by Jessica Gildersleeve Part 3. Modernist Ecopoetics, Vitalism and the Pastoral Chapter 7. Landscapes and Mindscapes: The Confluence of Modernism and Ecopoetics in Eleanor Dark’s Return to Coolami by Kathleen Davidson Chapter 8. Connecting Water and Land: Revisiting Nationalism in the Vitalist Aesthetics of Eleanor Dark and Vance Palmer by Victoria Kuttainen Chapter 9. Scales of Relation: Eleanor Dark’s Waterway, the Aquatic Pastoral and Communal Mourning by Fiona Morrison Part 4. The Timeless Land Chapter 10. In Conversation: The Historical Imagination and Legacy of Eleanor Dark by Tom Griffiths and Grace Karskens Chapter 11. Outlaws of History: Eleanor Dark’s Trilogy of Nation by Philip Mead Chapter 12. Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land *Trilogy as Anthropocene Narrative *by Meg Brayshaw Chapter 13. Eleanor Dark’s Chronotopes: Time and Narration in The Timeless Land Trilogy by Michael Griffiths Chapter 14. “A Careless Sort of Benevolence”: Melodrama and Critique in The Timeless Land *Trilogy *by Brigid Rooney Part 5. Writing in a Time of Crisis Chapter 15. Reading The Little Company in Times of Crisis by Susan Carson Contributors Index
Brigid Rooney is affiliated with the University of Sydney where for several decades she researched and taught Australian literature and Australian studies. She has published widely on twentieth century and contemporary Australian writing and is the author of Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life (2009) and Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity (2018). Fiona Morrison is an Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW Sydney, where she has taught and supervised in the areas of postcolonial and world literatures, Australian literature and women’s writing. Her most recent book, Christina Stead and the Matter of America (2019), won the Walter McRae Russell Award in 2021 (ASAL). She is currently working on a book-length study of Henry Handel Richardson.
