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Image courtesy of publisher's website.
Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 The Transported Imagination : Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In the early twentieth century, new technologies of media, communication, and transportation opened up a world of possibilities and led to transformations of the public sphere. Amongst the hundreds of new periodicals flooding the Australian marketplace, quality culture and leisure magazines beckoned to readers with the glamour of modernity and exotic images of pre-modern paradise. Through instructive and entertaining content, these glossy modern magazines widened the horizons of non-metropolitan audiences and connected readers in rapidly urbanising cities such as Sydney and Melbourne with the latest fashions, current affairs, and cultural offerings of London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and beyond. Designed by fashionable commercial artists, travel advertisements for shipping companies such as Burns Philp, Cunard, Matson, and P&O lined their pages. The golden age of the culture and leisure magazine coincided with the golden age of sea travel, middlebrow aspiration, and modernity.

'Focusing on the Australian interwar periodicals The Home, The BP Magazine, and MAN, this book explores the contraction of vast geographical spaces and the construction of cultural hierarchies alongside the advent of new media. This book investigates the role tastemaking culture and leisure magazines played in transporting the public imagination outward beyond the shores of Australia and upward or downward on the rapidly changing scales of cultural value. By delivering a potent mix of informative instruction, entertainment, worldliness, and escape, these magazines constructed distinct geographical imaginaries connected to notions of glamour, sophistication, and aspiration. They guided their readers through the currents of international modernity and helped them find their place in the modern world.

'This book is based on thorough research into an archive of important yet under-examined modern Australian periodicals, and makes a significant contribution to the scholarly literature on magazines and middlebrow culture in the interwar period. It offers new insights into the formation of the tastes of a rapidly modernising and differentiating reading public, as well as new understandings of the cultures of vernacular modernity and colonialism. This book also offers alternative perspectives, and positions Australia’s cultural and literary history within transnational cultural flows across the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Its analysis of Australian colonial modernity thus provides a model for examining collisions of modernity and colonialism, and for investigating connections between geographical imaginaries and social mobility, in other international contexts.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Notes

  • Table of contents:

    Introduction: A Door to the World

    Part One: Geography

    Chapter 1: International Affairs

    Chapter 2: Non-Fiction Travel Features

    Chapter 3: Fashion and Advertising

    Part Two: Cultural Value

    Chapter 4: Authors and Artists

    Chapter 5: Book and Film Reviews

    Part Three: Temporality

    Chapter 6: Currents of Fiction

    Chapter 7: Pacific Travellers

    Conclusion: Points of Disembarkation

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Amherst, New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Cambria Press ,
      2018 .
      image of person or book cover 4381588445028271545.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 354p.p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 1 June 2018.

      ISBN: 9781621964155

Works about this Work

Victoria Kuttainen, Susann Leibich and Sarah Galletly, Eds., The Transported Imagination : Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity Megan Mooney Taylor , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 21 no. 1 2021;

— 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
'The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity is a timely and significant addition to the field of periodical studies in Australia, which has seen an increasing amount of academic focus in recent years. The innovative and instructive uses of Trove, as well as a deepening understanding of the role periodicals played in the development of Australian literary culture and production, has led to the burgeoning of periodical study in both quantitative and qualitative directions. The Transported Imagination builds on the groundbreaking work of such researchers as David Carter, Robert Dixon and Roger Osborne as well as the work on island spatiality of Elizabeth McMahon and engages in a qualitative, focused deep-dive on three interwar periodicals, The BP Magazine, The Home and MAN.' 

 (Publication abstract)

[Review] The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity Chelsea Barnett , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Historical Studies , vol. 51 no. 2 2020; (p. 233-234)

— 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

'The Transported Imagination, an elegantly presented offering from Victoria Kuttainen, Susann Liebich and Sarah Galletly, explores the intersecting themes of modernity, colonialism, glamour and travel in three ‘culture and leisure’ magazines in interwar Australia. Through their engagement with the varied content of Home (1920–42), The BP Magazine (1928–42) and MAN (1936–72), the authors argue that representations of travel functioned as a means for these magazines to both construct and negotiate what it meant to be modern in interwar Australia, particularly at a time where, they argue, ‘the Pacific was at the fore of the nation's consciousness and imagination’ (18). Organised across three parts – Geography, Cultural Value, and Temporality – the book endeavours to show that it was not just physical travel that was so crucial to interwar ideas of modernity but imagined travel as well. Indeed, the authors engage with the concept of ‘geographical imaginary’ and the ‘outward gaze’ to contend that, as cultural texts, magazines enabled readers to forge a connection to a world beyond Australian shores and understand themselves as on the cutting edge of global fashion, cinematic, literary, and artistic trends – even if they never left their armchairs.' (Introduction)

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
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
[Review] The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity Chelsea Barnett , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Historical Studies , vol. 51 no. 2 2020; (p. 233-234)

— 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

'The Transported Imagination, an elegantly presented offering from Victoria Kuttainen, Susann Liebich and Sarah Galletly, explores the intersecting themes of modernity, colonialism, glamour and travel in three ‘culture and leisure’ magazines in interwar Australia. Through their engagement with the varied content of Home (1920–42), The BP Magazine (1928–42) and MAN (1936–72), the authors argue that representations of travel functioned as a means for these magazines to both construct and negotiate what it meant to be modern in interwar Australia, particularly at a time where, they argue, ‘the Pacific was at the fore of the nation's consciousness and imagination’ (18). Organised across three parts – Geography, Cultural Value, and Temporality – the book endeavours to show that it was not just physical travel that was so crucial to interwar ideas of modernity but imagined travel as well. Indeed, the authors engage with the concept of ‘geographical imaginary’ and the ‘outward gaze’ to contend that, as cultural texts, magazines enabled readers to forge a connection to a world beyond Australian shores and understand themselves as on the cutting edge of global fashion, cinematic, literary, and artistic trends – even if they never left their armchairs.' (Introduction)

Victoria Kuttainen, Susann Leibich and Sarah Galletly, Eds., The Transported Imagination : Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity Megan Mooney Taylor , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 21 no. 1 2021;

— 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
'The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity is a timely and significant addition to the field of periodical studies in Australia, which has seen an increasing amount of academic focus in recent years. The innovative and instructive uses of Trove, as well as a deepening understanding of the role periodicals played in the development of Australian literary culture and production, has led to the burgeoning of periodical study in both quantitative and qualitative directions. The Transported Imagination builds on the groundbreaking work of such researchers as David Carter, Robert Dixon and Roger Osborne as well as the work on island spatiality of Elizabeth McMahon and engages in a qualitative, focused deep-dive on three interwar periodicals, The BP Magazine, The Home and MAN.' 

 (Publication abstract)

Last amended 10 Jan 2019 10:23:52
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