'Christos Tsiolkas is one of the most recognizable and internationally successful literary novelists working in Australia today. He is also one of the country’s most politically engaged writers. These terms – recognition, commercial success, political engagement – suggest a relationship to forms of public discourse that belies the extremely confronting nature of much of Tsiolkas’s fiction and his deliberate attempt to cultivate a literary persona oriented to notions of blasphemy, obscenity and what could broadly be called a pornographic sensibility. ‘Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique’ traces these contradictions against Tsiolkas’s acute sense of the waning of working-class identity, and reads his work as a sustained examination of the ways in which literature might express an opposition to capitalist modernity.' (Publication summary)
Table of Contents
Preface; Introduction: Pasolini’s Ashes; 1. The Down-Curve of Capital: ‘Loaded’; 2. Inside the Machine: From ‘Loaded’ to ‘The Jesus Man’; 3. The Pornographic Logic of Global Capitalism: ‘Dead Europe’; 4. In the Suburbs of World Literature: From ‘Dead Europe’ to ‘The Slap’; 5. The Politics of the Bestseller: ‘The Slap’ and ‘Barracuda’; Conclusion: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Politics of Fiction; Notes; Bibliography; Index
