Issue Details: First known date: 2016... 2016 ‘[W]hen the Highway Catches up with Us’ : Negotiating Late Modernity in Eleanor Dark's Lantana Lane
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'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)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Queensland Review Queensland Modernism vol. 23 no. 2 2016 11363617 2016 periodical issue

    'To posit Queensland's modernism may seem like an oxymoron. Queensland is often the butt of the southern states’ jokes. North of its more cultured and intellectual sibling-states (or so popular perception would have it), Queensland is ‘backward’, naïve, behind the times, provincial. According to this mythology, Brisbane is a glorified country town, Queenslanders refuse daylight saving for the sake of their very sensitive cows and curtains, and there is very little ‘culture’ to mention.' (Editorial introduction)

    2016
    pg. 207-223
Last amended 13 Jun 2017 13:12:48
207-223 ‘[W]hen the Highway Catches up with Us’ : Negotiating Late Modernity in Eleanor Dark's Lantana Lanesmall AustLit logo Queensland Review
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