Issue Details: First known date: 2021... 2021 Paul Sharrad, Thomas Keneally and the Literary Machine
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'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)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Commonwealth Essays and Studies In Other Worlds vol. 43 no. 2 2021 22528846 2021 periodical issue 'When the COVID pandemic was officially announced in France in March 2020 and the country went into lockdown, a lot changed almost overnight in unprecedented ways. Among more dramatic measures, academic conferences were cancelled or postponed, and editorial schedules were consequently disrupted. After the initial shock, we decided to work on a journal issue that would help us think about the crisis in terms of the questions with which we usually deal. “In Other Worlds: Imagining What Comes Next” reflects on the ways in which postcolonial literature imaginatively addresses situations of crisis originating in pandemics and other ecological evolutions, and the political schemes that accompany them. The five essays (and related writer interview) analyse and illustrate how writers have developed creatively the genres of dystopia, speculative fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, and climate fiction to apprehend what is at stake in these crises, in narratives that confront readers with human vulnerability but also point at new forms of empowerment that are sources of hope.' (Publication abstract) 2021
Last amended 2 Aug 2021 13:12:02
Paul Sharrad, Thomas Keneally and the Literary Machinesmall AustLit logo Commonwealth Essays and Studies
Informit * Subscription service. Check your library.
Review of:
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X