The worldly text and the production of more-than-literary place: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and Melbourne’s ‘inner north’

Abstract

Literature about place is frequently conceived by writers and readers as a response to, or a reproduction of, place. This essay is an intervention in disciplinary and interdisciplinary conceptualisations of literature and place where the text is positioned as a product of place. Our objective here is to provide an account of how literature might produce place, or more specifically, an account of how certain literary texts contribute to the production of place in material, and more-than-literary, ways. We call these types of literary texts the worldly text. The worldly text is more than a mirror or commentator on place. It is an actor in the material production of place. In considering the worldly text as an articulation of the literature-place interface, we investigate how images and affects from Helen Garner’s 1977 novel, Monkey Grip, influence understandings and formations of place in Melbourne, specifically how the text reflexively participates in processes of urban transformation in the city’s iconic inner northern suburbs of Fitzroy and Carlton.