Metropolis and memory: Constructing cosmopolitanisms in Lisa Lang’s Utopian Man (2010)

Presented as part of the 2016 SLLL Literary Studies Seminar Series This paper examines Lisa Lang’s award-winning Australian novel Utopian Man (2010), which reimagines E.W. Cole and his famous Book Arcade in Melbourne in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Running in its central Melbourne location from 1883-1929, Cole’s Book Arcade was, and is, synonymous with nineteenth-century Melbourne itself. Its vibrant, eclectic atmosphere seemed to capture the essence of the booming nineteenth-century metropolis, as it was represented in popular discourses of the time and as it continues to be represented in contemporary re-constructions of the historical city. In Lang’s novel, as in other narratives of the nineteenth-century city, Cole’s Book Arcade is a lens through which to view Melbourne itself. However, while the Arcade stands as a symbol of the modern, cosmopolitan and progressive city, the tone of the novel is nostalgic: it is clear that this city is lost. At the close of the novel, the Arcade that had opened up readers to a world of ideas through the world of reading is anachronistic, and reading itself is replaced by other forms of entertainment. This nostalgia for a lost past positions Lang’s novel, with its reimagined Arcade, as witness to Australia’s lost alternative of a tolerant society, one that embraced other views and welcomed a range of people, and which exists today only as memory. Kate Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in English at The Australian National University. Her research is focused on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary and cultural history with a particular focus on neo-Victorian fiction and historical recollection in fictional narratives. She is author of History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages (Palgrave, 2010), and her articles on historical fiction have appeared in Neo-Victorian Studies and a number of edited collections and journals. She has co-edited a collection of essays entitled Reading the Represented Past: Literature & Historical Consciousness, 1700 to the Present (Palgrave 2013).