Melinda Cooper Melinda Cooper i(11339649 works by) (a.k.a. Melinda J. Cooper)
Gender: Female
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1 2 y separately published work icon Middlebrow Modernism : Eleanor Dark's Interwar Fiction Melinda Cooper , Sydney : Sydney University Press , 2022 24744452 2022 multi chapter work criticism

'Eleanor Dark (1901-85) is one of Australia's most innovative 20th-century writers. Her extensive oeuvre includes ten novels published from the early 1930s to the late 1950s, and represents a significant engagement with global modernity from a unique position within settler culture. Yet Dark's contribution to 20th-century literature has been undervalued in the fields of both Australian literary studies and world literature. Although two biographies have been written about her life, there has been no book-length critical study of her writing published since 1976.

'Middlebrow Modernism counters this neglect by providing the first full-length critical survey of Eleanor Dark's writing to be published in over four decades. Focusing on the fiction that Dark produced during the interwar years and reading this in the context of her larger body of work, this book positions Dark's writing as important to the study of Australian literature and global modernism.

'Melinda Cooper argues that Dark's fiction exhibits a distinctive aesthetic of middlebrow modernism, which blends attributes of literary modernism with popular fiction. It seeks to mediate and reconcile apparent binaries: modernism and mass culture; liberal humanism and experimental aesthetics; settler society and international modernity. The term middlebrow modernism also captures the way Dark negotiated cosmopolitan commitments with more place-based attachments to nation and local community within the mid-20th century.

'Middlebrow Modernism posits that Dark's fiction and the broader phenomenon of Australian modernism offer essential case studies for larger debates operating within global modernist and world literature studies, providing perspectives these fields might otherwise miss.'  (Publication summary)

1 News from Australia : Global Modernism Studies and the Case of Australian Modernism Melinda Cooper , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature 2020; (p. 181-192)

"One of the major developments in literary studies of the past two decades is the resurgence of interest in the discursive fields of both modernism and modernity. This chapter asks what the case of Australian modernism can offer to global modernism studies. In many ways, Australian modernism provides an exemplary illustration of the temporal, geographical, vertical, and aesthetic expansions theorised by the ‘new modernist’ studies. Yet Australian modernism can also point to some of the problems, blind spots, and elisions of expanded theorisations of modernism. By exploring examples from both settler and Indigenous art and literature, this chapter shows that the concepts produced in the metropolitan centres of modernism studies can be modified and made more nuanced by coming into contact with the complexities of a settler-colonial situation."

Source: Abstract.

1 ‘A Masterpiece of Camouflage’ : Modernism and Interwar Australia Melinda Cooper , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Modernist Cultures , August vol. 15 no. 3 2020; (p. 316-340)

'Interwar Australia has often been seen as geographically and culturally distant from the centres of modernity, with 1930s Australian literary culture viewed through the tropes of isolation, insularity and quarantine. Through a reading of Eleanor Dark's experimental novel Prelude to Christopher (1934), I contest this idea, arguing that interwar Australia contained its own latent modernisms and modernities, which were often hidden alongside anti-modernist positions and inside other discourses such as cultural nationalism. This essay contributes to recent reinvestigations of the cosmopolitanism/nationalism binary and calls for these categories to be rethought in more interconnected terms. It also examines Dark's modernist and gendered critique of eugenics in light of the larger project of settler colonialism.' (Publication abstract)

1 Review of The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity, by Victoria Kuttainen, Susann Liebich and Sarah Galletly Melinda Cooper , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , July vol. 34 no. 1 2019;

— Review of The Transported Imagination : Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity Victoria Kuttainen , Susann Liebich , Sarah Galletly , 2018 multi chapter work criticism
1 'Adjusted Vision' : Interwar Settler Modernism in Eleanor Dark's Return to Coolami Melinda Cooper , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 9 July vol. 33 no. 2 2018;

'This essay uses the interwar writing of Eleanor Dark to destabilise the binary between nationalist-realism and experimental modernism in accounts of Australian literature. Dark’s novels mix modernist and experimental styles with middlebrow and vernacular forms, while also legitimating settler nationalist desires. This constellation was not unique to Dark but was part of a broader phenomenon which I call interwar settler modernism: the modernism produced by settler artists and writers between the wars, often through a promiscuous engagement with elite, middlebrow and vernacular forms of culture. Dark’s novel Return to Coolami (1936) exemplifies interwar settler modernism, combining recognisably modernist techniques with middlebrow romance, elements of vernacular culture such as photography, cinema and motor travel, and cultural-nationalist ideas. This study traces some of the contours of interwar settler modernism through examining Dark’s ideas about visual perception, time, memory and interior psychological states. It will explore the implications of settler modernism for studies of Australian literature and, more broadly, for global modernism studies.'

Source: Abstract.

1 ‘Being Made into a Machine’ : An Extract from Eleanor Dark’s Unpublished Novel ‘Pilgrimage’ Melinda Cooper , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Hecate , vol. 43 no. 1/2 2017; (p. 95-104)

'Eleanor Dark’s novel “Pilgrimage” has never been published. She began writing it in January 1921, a year before her marriage, and finished it in the late 1920s, when she and Eric Dark were establishing their home in Katoomba.1 In the early 1930s, Eleanor tried to get “Pilgrimage” published, sending it to her literary agent in London, and showing it to P.R. Stephensen, who had published her novel Prelude to Christopher in Sydney in 1934 (Brooks with Clark 122). “Pilgrimage” was not accepted for publication, and Eleanor appears to have abandoned any attempt at this.' (Introduction)

1 ‘This Long and Shining Finger of the Sea Itself’ : Sydney Harbour and Regional Cosmopolitanism in Eleanor Dark’s Waterway Melinda Cooper , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 17 no. 1 2017;

'In Eleanor Dark’s novel Waterway (1938), Professor Channon is prompted by the ominous international headline ‘Failure of Peace Talks’ to imagine the world from a global perspective (120). Channon feels himself metaphorically ‘lifted away from the earth … seeing it from an incredible distance, and with an incredible, an all-embracing comprehension’ (119-20). This move outward from a located perspective to ‘a more detached overview of a wider global space’ signifies a cosmopolitan viewpoint, ‘in which the viewing subject rises above the placebound attachments of the nation-state to take the measure of the world as a wider totality’ (Hegglund 8-9). Yet even this global view is mediated by Channon’s position from within ‘a great island continent alone in its south sea’ (121). Gazing from a ‘vast distance,’ he views Europe as ‘the patches where parasitic man had lived longest and most densely,’ and from which humankind ‘went out to infect fresh lands’ (120). This description of old world Europe as ‘parasitic’ provides a glimpse of resistant nationalism, reflecting Channon’s location within one of the ‘fresh lands’ affected by colonisation. Channon is ultimately unable to sustain a ‘Godlike’ perspective in this scene, desiring ‘nothing but to return’ to local place (121). Although his view initially ‘vaults beyond the bounds of national affiliation’ (Alexander and Moran 4), this move outward does not ‘nullify an affective attachment to the more grounded locations of human attachment’ (Hegglund 20). Channon’s return to the ‘shabby home … of his own humanity’ brings a renewed sense of connection to ‘the sun-warmed rail of the gate’ and ‘the faint breeze [which] ruffled the hair back from his forehead’ (122).' (Introduction)

1 [Review] New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham Melinda Cooper , 2017 single work review
— Appears in: Queensland Review , December vol. 24 no. 2 2017; (p. 322-324)

— Review of New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham 'Anna Wickham' , 2017 selected work poetry

'At the age of ten, Anna Wickham (1883–1947), born Edith Alice Mary Harper, promised her father that she would become a poet. She made the promise in Wickham Terrace in Brisbane, where her family lived for a period after emigrating from London. She later adopted the pseudonym ‘Anna Wickham’ in honour of this moment. Wickham’s life was strikingly transnational. She departed Australia in 1904 to study opera singing in London and Paris, and shared friendships with many prominent writers, including D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Dylan Thomas. Her husband, Patrick Hepburn, opposed her writing. In 1913, he had Wickham incarcerated in an asylum for several months, during which she wrote eighty more poems. By the time of her death by suicide in 1947, Wickham had written over 1,400 poems. Her work suffered some critical neglect in traditional accounts of literary modernism; however, critics are now beginning to recognise her as a significant modernist and feminist poet.' (Introduction)

1 Gretchen Shirm, Where the Light Falls Melinda Cooper , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Long Paddock , vol. 76 no. 3 2017;
'At the heart of Gretchen Shirm’s novel Where the Light Falls is a meditation on silence, and art as of a means of speaking. The novel’s protagonist, Andrew Spruce, is an art photographer who sees “honesty in broken things” (298), choosing subjects that are damaged in some way: a fractured tea cup that has been glued back together, a grown man with a full set of baby teeth, a girl with a paralysed face. Through framing and capturing a broken subject, Andrew is able to transform it—a metaphor for integrating traumatic experiences into reality. Shirm writes, “A photograph could do this: it could make strangeness seem normal and transform it into a thing of beauty” (205). In this novel, the act of representing is ultimately a means of healing.' (Introduction)
1 ‘[W]hen the Highway Catches up with Us’ : Negotiating Late Modernity in Eleanor Dark's Lantana Lane Melinda Cooper , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , vol. 23 no. 2 2016; (p. 207-223)
'Eleanor Dark's last published novel, Lantana Lane (published 1959), is not usually included in accounts of Australian modernism. The novel's strong criticisms of modernity, its regional focus and the Cold War context complicate its inclusion as a modernist text. However, revised understandings of modernism generated in the past few decades of scholarship allow for a reinvestigation of Dark's novel as a response to the conditions of late modernity. In particular, Dark explores the pressures exerted on local space by modern capitalism in a period of post-war reconstruction, showing how the national and global scales encroach upon and threaten to annihilate local particularity. Through drawing on a number of broadly modernist practices, including those of entanglement, suspension, metageography and primitivism, Dark pushes back against modernity's narratives of progress and attempts to recover space for the literary and the small scale. Lantana Lane demonstrates how ‘regional modernisms’ written from ‘peripheral’ locations can draw attention to the uneven distribution of modernity within national and global space, and offer alternative — if provisional — sites of attachment.' (Publication abstract)
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