Rewriting History

Peter Carey’s Fictional Biography of Australia

AvAndreas Gaile

Häftad, Engelska, 2024

Del 184 i serien Costerus New Series

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Beskrivning

Peter Carey is one of the most richly awarded and critically acclaimed novelists of the present day. Most of his fictions relate to questions of Australian history and identity. Rewriting History argues that taken together Carey’s novels make up a fictional biography of Australia. The reading proposed here considers both key events in the life of the subject of Carey’s biography (such as the exploration of the interior of the continent, the dispossession of the Aborigines, the convict experience, the process of Australia’s coming of age as a postcolonial country) as well as its identity. Rewriting History demonstrates how Carey exposes the lies and deceptions that make up the traditional representations of Australian history and supplants them with a new national story – one that because of its fictional status is not bound to the rigidities of traditional historical discourse. At a time of momentous cultural change, when Australia is being transformed from a “New Britannia in another world” to a nation not merely in, but actually of the Asia-Pacific region, Carey’s fiction, this book argues, calls for the construction of a postcolonial national identity that acknowledges the wrongs of the past and gives Australians a sense of cultural orientation between their British past and their multicultural present.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2024-03-20
Mått:155 x 235 x 21 mm
Vikt:607 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Costerus New Series
Antal sidor:350
Förlag:Brill
ISBN:9789042030701

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Recensioner i media

Shortlisted for the McRae Award 2011.From the Judges’ Report: "Re-writing History is an impressive tribute to Carey’s contribution to a ‘nascent mythology’ (rather than a revisionist history) via his complex fictions. Responding to the already fine and far-ranging analysis of Carey’s fiction from Australian and international scholars, Gaile is erudite in his examination of Carey’s Australian novels and their use of post-modernist literary tricks of fabulation, magic realism and metafiction. He offers a valuable re-reading of Carey’s use of these strategies as postmodernism with ‘moral concern’ tied to an ‘emancipatory vision’ of Australia’s history."

Innehållsförteckning

AcknowledgementsIntroductionTheoretical PremisesRewriting History: Theoretical PremisesTheorizing Carey’s Fictional BiographyAfter the Grand Narratives: From History to MythistoryStrategies of an Illywhacker (I): Replacing the Truth-Paradigm with a “Weaseling Kind of ‘Truth’”Strategies of an Illywhacker (II): Transcending Historical RealityStrategies of an Illywhacker (III): Telling History as StoryCarey’s Biography of Australia: Key Events in the Life of a NationDissecting the Lies of Terra Nullius: The Nightmare of Aboriginal HistoryDeconstructing Leichhardt: Peter Carey and the Explorer Myth“Decolonizing the Mind” (I): Colonial Australia“Decolonizing the Mind” (II): Postcolonial AustraliaCarey’s Biography of Australia: Australian Identity“Trying to Make Out the Southern Cross”, Or, The Dilemma of Australian IdentityThe Real Matilda: Re-Inscribing the “Pygmies” of Australian CultureIntruders in the Bush: Women in Male DomainsPostscriptWrong About Carey? Reading Carey in Post-Postmodern TimesBibliographyIndex