Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity

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.