Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland

This book explores the spatiality of post-World War II Australian society through the vehicle of David Ireland’s literature. Employing concepts from radical geography and structural Marxist literary theory, it posits the existence of a spatial unconscious of literary texts, whereby they encode the spatiality of the society into which they are born. By mining the spatial unconscious of Ireland’s texts, we can create a complex, unique and highly fertile atlas of the spaces and places of Australia. In particular, Ireland’s works ideologically handle the contradictory relationship between capitalism’s regime of abstract space, rooted in the production process and the state, and the meaningful social places that can be forged out of the struggle of social forces including workers, lumpenproletarians, women and indigenous peoples. In the midst of the contemporary spatial crisis, this study of Ireland is a form of mapping, creating an atlas by which we might plot our past and present and orient ourselves to the future.