Cirrus@Austlit

'Memoir essay looking back on Keneally's career and shifts in the Australian literary landscape. Keneally concludes: 'if I were given the chance to make a statement before the Australian literary bench, again more a 1964 idea than a 2014 one, I would say this. "Your Honour, I didn’t die after The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. My work thereafter has been of sufficient technical and creative value as to attract interest, and yet, in part through my own erratic choices, it has not. I think, for example, that the novel, The Playmaker, is a book of far more importance than The Chant. I acknowledge that the writer is the least reliable commentator on these matters, but from within my skin there has been a steady continuity in my work where, perhaps because of the egregious Schindler book, others have seen a fracture, a before-and-after. If I had a wish, it would be that my more recent work be viewed with the same interest as my earlier, because I think it so much better"'.'

Source: Abstract.

'So at fifty years, what can we say? An easy conclusion would be that Keneally is best understood (as he himself has suggested from time to time) as a good craftsman of readable stories that raise serious issues, a writer better suited to the literary mass-market found in north America than to the more anxious and divided cultural space of literary Australia. But that fails at some point to do justice to the author’s capacity to write an experimental, challenging, literary work one year and a formula entertainment the next. In a real sense, Keneally the novelist is that variety, that impulsive flair, that unusual mix of person and persona, author and work that refuses ready categorisation, whether by scholars or bookshop salespoints. My conclusion is that it is our entrenched understanding of a literary career as much as any particular schools of literary value (modernism, realism, postmodernism, and so forth) that generates critical oscillations and uncertainties around Keneally’s writing, and precisely because this idea itself is now under reconstruction in ways Bourdieu could not have imagined, we will have to wait for a while to find a fully satisfying model by which to understand his complete works. In the meantime, revisiting A Place at Whitton offers us a fair guide.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) and Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party (2011) resonate with the violence of the colonising process. The books relate, respectively, to murders that took place in New South Wales in 1901 just prior to Federation, and in Tasmania during the 1820s. Both novels employ elements of the Gothic mode to represent social disorder, and equate systematic racism with the mechanics of moral corruption in a hostile colonial environment. In their efforts to make sense of the past each, in its own way, has something to say about how opportunism and upward social mobility are linked to the possession of whiteness. Each taps into an historical frame of reference in which whiteness is understood, not simply as skin colour, but as something essential to the founding vision of Australia as a nation.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The making of Thomas Keneally can be conventionally addressed in regard to his Irish Catholic working-class ancestry, his discovery of a vocation that was not the priesthood, and the forging of a career that has been at once an artistic and a commercial success. The approach here will be more oblique, examining the role of Manning Clark, the early volumes of whose A History of Australia were an important influence on such novels by Keneally as Bring Larks and Heroes (1968), and to a lesser extent Patrick White, in the making of Thomas Keneally; also the ways in which – as Keneally himself put it, with some ambivalence – ‘the critics made me.’'

Source: Abstract.

'A discussion of Thomas Keneally's status as 'Irish-Australian writer.''

Source: Abstract.

'Keneally has frequently put himself in the way of historical crises, and has risked and most often found his individual voice within epochal stories. Such patterns of risk-taking inform much of his work, including his engagement with American materials. Here I will focus on two of his several envisionings of the Civil War, the novel Confederates (1979) and the biography Abraham Lincoln (2003), and conclude with a differently focused work, the memoir Searching for Schindler (2007), which is an American autobiography in tone and strategy as much as in setting and character.'

Source: Abstract.