Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage: Making and Unmaking the Postcolonial Novel

Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-90-04-30997-5
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 187, 320 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 599 g

Reihe: Cross/Cultures

Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage examines key developments in the field of the Australian postcolonial historical novel from 1989 to the present. In parallel with this analysis, A. Frances Johnson undertakes a unique study of in-kind creativity, reflecting on how her own nascent historical fiction has been critically and imaginatively shaped and inspired by seminal experiments in the genre – by writers as diverse as Kate Grenville, Mudrooroo, Kim Scott, Peter Carey, Richard Flanagan, and Rohan Wilson.
Mapping the postcolonial novel against the impact of postcolonial cultural theory and Australian writers’ intermittent embrace of literary postmodernism, this survey is also read against the post-millenial ‘history’ and ‘culture wars’ which saw politicizations of national debates around history and fierce contestation over the ways stories of Australian pasts have been written.

Autoren/Hrsg.

A. Johnson, Frances

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Postkoloniale Literaturen in Englisch, Englische Literatur außerhalb Europas
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Postkoloniale Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
A Note on Style
Introduction: Making and Unmaking the Postcolonial Historical Novel

1 Genre Memory: Australian Historical Novels in Context
Postcolonial Provocations: Old and New Approaches to Genre
Intercultural Representation: Intergeneric Strategies in Eugene’s Falls and Beyond

2 Intertextuality and the Postcolonial Novel of History
Recent Explorations of Intertextuality and Heteroglossia: The Influence of Benang and That Deadman Dance
Theories of Intertextuality and the Postcolonial Context
Intertextuality and Intercultural Subjectivity: Australian Contexts

3 Elision and Engagement: Writing Indigeneity in Post-Bicentennial Historical Novels
New Speech Genres: Portrayals of Indigeneity in White Writing 1989–2000
Out of the Impasse? Re-thinking Intercultural Engagement and Subject-Positions

4 Postmodern Rats in the Ranks: The Novelist and the Historian as Raiders of the Colonial Archive
The Trouble with History: Scaling the Archive
Ideology and Politics: A Background to the History Wars
The Novelist in the Archive: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River Trilogy and Kim Scott’s Benang and That Deadman Dance
White-Gloved Border Police: Archival Custody and the Protection of History
Whose Treasure? Clendinnen’s Reef and the Wreck of the Postcolonial Novel

5 Speaking in Tongues: The Novelist as Historiographic Fool
Historiographic Metafiction as Postmodern, Postcolonial Intervention
Metafictional Conceits in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang and Robert Drewe’s Our Sunshine
Metafictional Tactics in Eugene’s Falls
Focalization and Radical Polyphony in Recent Postcolonial Historical Novels
Learning from Scott and Carey: Polyphony, Translation, and Mistranslation in the Postcolonial Novel

6 Writing South of South: Extinction Discourse in Novelizations of Tasmanian Colonial Pasts
Roving History: Intercultural Representation in the Novels of Rohan Wilson
Eden Unsettled: Parody and Post-Gothicism in Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers
Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish: History and Story in the Postmodern Acquarium

Conclusion: Beyond the Dry Dock
Appendix 1: Postcolonial/Post-Colonial Debates in Context
Appendix 2: Lessons in ‘The Lost Garden’: A First-Contact Tasmanian Historical Novel in Progress
Works Cited
Index

Über Autor(innen)

A. Frances Johnson, Ph.D (2009), The University of Melbourne, is a prize-winning poet and novelist and head of the Creative Writing program at the University of Melbourne. She has published widely on portrayals of colonial Indigenous figures in Australian literature. Her novel Eugene's Falls (Arcadia, 2007) retraced the journeys of 19th century colonial painter Eugene von Guerard. A new novel in progress explores French first-contact histories in Southern Tasmania.