Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 Sublime Wilderness : Embracing the Non-Human in Richard Flanagan’s Tasmania
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Narrator Sid Hammet's opening remark in Gould's Book of Fish (2001) encapsulates a recurring theme of Richard Flanagan's fiction: the perception of human existence as something bigger than Western materialism and urban existence, of anthropic life as one element within a profound, mysterious cosmos. Flanagan conveys this transcendental awareness through a style of writing that frequently involves magical realist elements and which is inextricably tied to a philosophy based on ecology and a connection to the Tasmanian landscape, a philosophy influenced by Indigenous Tasmanians and their precolonial culture. In particular, Flanagan blends the magical and the environmental through his persistent leitmotif of wilderness, specifically Tasmania's unique and remote South-West Wilderness.' (Introduction) 
 

Notes

  • Epigraph: Maybe we have lost the ability, that sixth sense that allows us to see miracles and have visions and understand that we are something other, larger than what we have been told.' 
     

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Climate and Crises : Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse Ben Holgate , London : Routledge , 2019 19774938 2019 multi chapter work criticism

    'Climate and Crises: Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse makes a dual intervention in both world literature and ecocriticism by examining magical realism as an international style of writing that has long-standing links with environmental literature. The book argues that, in the era of climate change when humans are facing the prospect of species extinction, new ideas and new forms of expression are required to address what the novelist Amitav Gosh calls a "crisis of imagination." Magical realism enables writers to portray alternative intellectual paradigms, ontologies and epistemologies that typically contest the scientific rationalism derived from the European Enlightenment, and the exploitation of natural resources associated with both capitalism and imperialism. Climate and Crises explores the overlaps between magical realism and environmental literature, including their respective transgressive natures that dismantle binaries (such as human and non-human), a shared biocentric perspective that focuses on the inter-connectedness of all things in the universe, and, frequently, a critique of postcolonial legacies in formerly colonised territories. The book also challenges conventional conceptions of magical realism, arguing they are often influenced by a geographic bias in the construction of the orthodox global canon, and instead examines contemporary fiction from Asia (including China) and Australasia, two regions that have been largely neglected by scholarship of the narrative mode. As a result, the monograph modifies and expands our ideas of what magical realist fiction is.' (Publication summary)

    London : Routledge , 2019
    pg. 73-94
Last amended 30 Jul 2020 11:14:41
73-94 Sublime Wilderness : Embracing the Non-Human in Richard Flanagan’s Tasmaniasmall AustLit logo
Subjects:
  • Tasmania,
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