'Summer 1874, and Launceston teeters on the brink of anarchy. After abandoning his wife and child many years ago, the Black War veteran Thomas Toosey must return to the city to search for William, his now motherless twelve-year-old son. He travels through the island's northern districts during a time of impossible hardship - hardship that has left its mark on him too. Arriving in Launceston, however, Toosey discovers a town in chaos. He is desperate to find his son amid the looting and destruction, but at every turn he is confronted by the Irish transportee Fitheal Flynn and his companion, the hooded man, to whom Toosey owes a debt that he must repay.
'To Name Those Lost is the story of a father's journey. Wilson has an eye for the dirt, the hardness, the sheer dog-eat-doggedness of the lives of the poor. Human nature is revealed in all its horror and beauty as Thomas Toosey struggles with the good and the vile in himself and learns what he holds important.' (Publication summary)
'Dominant theorizations of settler colonialism identify it as a social form characterized by a problem with historical narration: because the existence of settler communities depends on the dispossession of indigenous peoples, settlers find themselves trapped by the need both to confront and to disavow these origins. How might this problem affect the aesthetics of the realist novel? This article argues that the historical novels produced in places like Australia and New Zealand constitute a distinctive variant of literary realism inflected by the ideological tensions of settler colonialism. Approaching the novel from the perspective of settler colonialism offers new ways to consider classic theories of realism and, in particular, reframes Georg Lukács's concept of reification—and the critical distinction between realism and naturalism he derived from it—as an unexpectedly useful tool for analyzing postcolonial literatures. Doing so, however, requires us to jettison Lukács's progressive historicism in favor of a model of literary history shaped by uneven temporalities and a fundamental disjunction between the historical perspectives of settler and nonsettler communities—thus complicating our narratives of the development of the novel genre. This argument is illustrated through an extended analysis of two of the most significant young novelists to engage recently with issues of settler colonial history: Eleanor Catton of New Zealand and Rohan Wilson of Australia.' (Publication abstract)
'Dominant theorizations of settler colonialism identify it as a social form characterized by a problem with historical narration: because the existence of settler communities depends on the dispossession of indigenous peoples, settlers find themselves trapped by the need both to confront and to disavow these origins. How might this problem affect the aesthetics of the realist novel? This article argues that the historical novels produced in places like Australia and New Zealand constitute a distinctive variant of literary realism inflected by the ideological tensions of settler colonialism. Approaching the novel from the perspective of settler colonialism offers new ways to consider classic theories of realism and, in particular, reframes Georg Lukács's concept of reification—and the critical distinction between realism and naturalism he derived from it—as an unexpectedly useful tool for analyzing postcolonial literatures. Doing so, however, requires us to jettison Lukács's progressive historicism in favor of a model of literary history shaped by uneven temporalities and a fundamental disjunction between the historical perspectives of settler and nonsettler communities—thus complicating our narratives of the development of the novel genre. This argument is illustrated through an extended analysis of two of the most significant young novelists to engage recently with issues of settler colonial history: Eleanor Catton of New Zealand and Rohan Wilson of Australia.' (Publication abstract)
