'Thomas Keneally is known as a best-selling novelist and public figure in his Australian homeland and has also managed a transnational career. He is, however, something of a conundrum in being regularly disparaged by critics and often failing to meet expectations of sales. ‘Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine’ explains some of the reasons behind such disparities, focusing in part on his deliberate transition from high-style modernist to ‘journeyman’ entertainer while continuing to write across both modes.
'Reactions to this shift have been framed by critical and cultural investments, and by an idea of the literary career common to both high literary and popular taste. This study examines the complex network that is a career, considering personality traits, authorial agency, agents, editors and shifts in publishing from colonial control to multinational corporations. As such, the study moves across and beyond conventional literary biography and literary history, incorporating aspects of book history and celebrity studies.
'In doing so, this book relies on Keneally’s extensive archive, much of it previously unexamined. It shows his ambition to earn his living from writing playing out across three markets, his work in other modes (writing for the stage and screen, travel writing, historical narratives) and the breadth and depth of expressions of his social conscience, including political protest, leading professional associations and work for constitutional reform, the Sydney Olympics, and so on. Keneally is seen as playing a long game across several events rather than honing one specialist skill, a strategy that has sustained for more than 50 years his keenness to live off writing.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Beginnings
2. The Collins Years
3. To the Booker
4. Afterwards
5. Republic and Beyond
6. Histories and Refugees
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.
'There is no doubt that Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine will, for many years to come, be an indispensable resource for scholars writing about the works of Thomas Keneally. Of course, Keneally continues to produce new works – in 2020, for example, he published a new novel, The Dickens Boy – so, over time, Paul Sharrad’s scholarly monograph will be seen as increasingly incomplete. Indeed, the most recent of Keneally’s works that receives meaningful coverage in the book is the 2014 publication of the third volume in Keneally’s unique history of Australia; the series is titled Australians, and this volume is subtitled ‘Flappers to Vietnam’. Nonetheless, it is difficult to imagine a future scholar writing about any of the works produced in the first fifty years of Keneally’s career (Keneally’s first book was The Place at Whitton, which was published in 1964) without referencing Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine; the depth and quality of the research is just that good.' (Publication abstract)
'Paul Sharrad has established a reputation as a first-rate, archivally-oriented literary scholar, and this book adds considerably to that repute. It is a quite stunningly detailed case and career study of a major postcolonial author, Thomas Keneally, and of his hard journey as a talented young writer emerging improbably from a plebeian Sydney suburb and somehow re-inventing and sustaining himself as a professional author for fifty years, writing classics such as The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), a grim, bloody tale of a young Aborigine’s violent response to the experience of colonial racism, and Schindler’s Ark (1982), his remarkable study of Oskar Schindler, a German profiteer whose Cracow factory became a place of refuge for Jews set for execution under Nazism. Sharrad calls Schindler’s Ark a “not wholly fictive book […] that earned [Keneally] his greatest literary award, sales and renown” (157). This “faction” account of a tortured Catholic businessman won Keneally the 1982 Booker Prize and was developed into a Spielberg movie. Sharrad explains how Keneally can be esteemed as a serious literary figure in Australia and an entertaining, popular writer elsewhere, noting, importantly, that “Keneally’s career happens not just as a series of runs in the same event: it is a combination of novel, drama, history, screen-writing” (199). Keneally has produced highly-charged ethical narratives exploring human redemption in a series of works which has comprised thirty-five novels, two children’s books, seventeen works of non-fiction, seven plays, eleven TV, film and radio scripts, and numerous essays.' (Introduction)
'Paul Sharrad has established a reputation as a first-rate, archivally-oriented literary scholar, and this book adds considerably to that repute. It is a quite stunningly detailed case and career study of a major postcolonial author, Thomas Keneally, and of his hard journey as a talented young writer emerging improbably from a plebeian Sydney suburb and somehow re-inventing and sustaining himself as a professional author for fifty years, writing classics such as The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), a grim, bloody tale of a young Aborigine’s violent response to the experience of colonial racism, and Schindler’s Ark (1982), his remarkable study of Oskar Schindler, a German profiteer whose Cracow factory became a place of refuge for Jews set for execution under Nazism. Sharrad calls Schindler’s Ark a “not wholly fictive book […] that earned [Keneally] his greatest literary award, sales and renown” (157). This “faction” account of a tortured Catholic businessman won Keneally the 1982 Booker Prize and was developed into a Spielberg movie. Sharrad explains how Keneally can be esteemed as a serious literary figure in Australia and an entertaining, popular writer elsewhere, noting, importantly, that “Keneally’s career happens not just as a series of runs in the same event: it is a combination of novel, drama, history, screen-writing” (199). Keneally has produced highly-charged ethical narratives exploring human redemption in a series of works which has comprised thirty-five novels, two children’s books, seventeen works of non-fiction, seven plays, eleven TV, film and radio scripts, and numerous essays.' (Introduction)
'There is no doubt that Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine will, for many years to come, be an indispensable resource for scholars writing about the works of Thomas Keneally. Of course, Keneally continues to produce new works – in 2020, for example, he published a new novel, The Dickens Boy – so, over time, Paul Sharrad’s scholarly monograph will be seen as increasingly incomplete. Indeed, the most recent of Keneally’s works that receives meaningful coverage in the book is the 2014 publication of the third volume in Keneally’s unique history of Australia; the series is titled Australians, and this volume is subtitled ‘Flappers to Vietnam’. Nonetheless, it is difficult to imagine a future scholar writing about any of the works produced in the first fifty years of Keneally’s career (Keneally’s first book was The Place at Whitton, which was published in 1964) without referencing Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine; the depth and quality of the research is just that good.' (Publication abstract)
