Last year’s ‘Sydney Moderns’ exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW surprised some viewers by drawing together Australian painters’ responses to modern building and engineering (the Sydney Harbour Bridge was a central image), showing their tentative movement into what we recognise as modernist art, only a decade or so after Picasso and Braque had exhibited their cubist experiments. Yet many of their images were more commercial than ‘high’ art, illustrations for Home magazine or colour schemes for interior design, a case of ‘modern style’ rather than ‘modern art’, as David Carter puts it in his book on Australian negotiations with modernism. The modernity of much Australian commercial or popular art throws into relief the apparent conservatism of its high culture.

Always Almost Modern gathers together Carter’s essays over twenty years exploring this Australian phenomenon, from his chapter on ‘Documenting and Criticising Society’ for the Penguin New Literary History of Australia in 1988 to his most recent researches into the 1920s and 1930s guides to ‘middlebrow’ taste in books and the history of the 1920s monthly magazine, Aussie. Some of the essays provide wide-ranging overviews of Australian literature and culture – especially, ‘Critics, Writers, Intellectuals’, first published as a chapter in Elizabeth Webby’s Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2000), and ‘The Wide Brown Land on the Silverscreen’, a merging of two essays on Australian film from the 1990s. Others are more particular in their focus, examining a range of 1920s and 1930s art and literature magazines, including Art in Australia, Vision, and All About Books, with survey accounts of long-forgotten and ephemeral publications such as Stream, Strife, Proletariat, Desiderata, and Pertinent.

The whole work unashamedly proclaims its perspective from the academy, with a revealing, almost comic, moment at the beginning of the first essay, ‘Weird Scribblings On the Beach’, when the author finds his own developing ideas about Nevil Shute’s apocalyptic novel being presented by another academic at a London conference: ‘as I watched my own enthusiasm for a study of On the Beach go up in smoke another project began to rise from the ashes.’ This project follows the recognition that the other academic’s paper is part of a recurring rhetorical pattern by which Australia is seen as already modern or postmodern, as the case may be, by virtue of its contemporaneity as a society, despite the belatedness of its cultural embrace of modernism, or postmodernism. Even anti-modernist campaigns, such as the Vision magazine project or post-World War II nationalism, can be seen as modernist in their awareness of the modern, and the way they come out of a newly formed society. It is a clever insight, and a little dazzling – but it is difficult to know what we should do with it. There is an implication, too, that Australian culture ought to be ‘up with the times’ to be fully worthy of attention by cultural critics.

In 2000, ‘Critics, Writers, Intellectuals’ might have been read as an objective account of the shifts in attitudes to Australian literature in the academy, tracing the slow acceptance of Australian literature as part of the English department curriculum up to the 1970s, including the way the novels of Patrick White briefly provided a reconciliation of ‘formalist’ and ‘nationalist’ approaches for some critics, through to the rise of a range of literary theories and cultural studies up to 2000. It ends with an acknowledgment that the shifts in university approaches to literature have been ‘at the cost of any secure sense of literature as a privileged or distinct domain of meaning’. In 2014, with university English departments in decline (not only their Australian literature courses), Carter’s observation that Vincent Buckley’s 1959 ‘notion that literature was not really a university subject sufficient to itself has been proven correct’ appears a remarkably detached, even complacent, view for a professor of Australian literature. Surely, he cares about the likely disappearance from the academy of the subject he professes. It seems the task of reading, analysing, supporting, or generating a vibrant literary culture in Australia once again must fall to the piecemeal efforts of book reviewers, school teachers, and publishers outside the academy – the very situation that Carter examines in the 1920s and 1930s.

Carter is also professor of Australian cultural history, and the other essays in the collection follow one of the lines he suggested for the future of literary studies – ‘turning literary criticism into cultural studies or cultural history’. His book is not about literature but about the culture around literature – the context of its dissemination, attempts to advise readers about it, class elements in its reception, and some of the peculiarities of Australian popular literature and film. The essay on ‘The Mystery of the Missing Middlebrow’ revives a strangely phrenological tag from British cultural snobbery (‘the mundane, respectable middlebrow’) and applies it to readerships in mid-century Australia. Of course, Carter is not the only critic who seems to find these ‘brow’ classifications useful, but they strike me as false in their attempt to corral readers into a level of reading taste rather than allowing them the possibility to range as widely as access to information and education will let them. As Carter reveals, it is a way to find a middle way, thus avoiding the ‘cultural studies habit of turning popular culture into a kind of vernacular avant-garde’ in opposition to conservative high culture.

In this book, Carter mainly leaves high culture alone. His essay on M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947) cleverly teases out its combination of utopian and anti-utopian elements, but the most entertaining chapter is an account of the way John O’Grady became the prisoner of his invention, Nino Culotta. Patrick White’s novels are mentioned in passing through the book as markers of high cultural modernism, except for the speculation that Voss (1957) is a prefiguration of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994): a high-camp adventure in the desert, excessive in its imagery and homely in its ending. That is where a refusal of the intrinsic complexities of an art work can lead. This book is almost always clever, with its sensitivity to paradox and rhetorical strategy, but it does suggest that the professors may be talking to each other while, outside the academy, our literary culture declines from lack of their close attention.