Transported and Transmuted single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2009... 2009 Transported and Transmuted
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'To the transported convicts, the first dominant feature of Australia is that it is too far away from the center of civilization. To undergo hardships on the sea with a messianic confidence (as the Pilgrims Fathers of America did) can at least be imagined as self-fulfillment; to be chained and locked in cabins on an eight-month long voyage without any decent purpose at all is totally another thing, disorienting to say the least. “Each on his or her eighteen inches of bed space”, looking out through the portholes of the ship (Keneally 1987a: 18), the convicts know but one thing: it’s a long distance from their home. They’re sent to the “world’s worse end”, as the opening sentence of Keneally’s Bring Larks and Heroes states (1967: 7). ' (59)

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  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon From Fixity to Fluidity : The Theme of Identity in Thomas Keneally's Fiction Xiaojin Zhou , Qindao : China Ocean University Press , 2009 Z1741824 2009 multi chapter work criticism

    'Born into an Irish Catholic family in Sydney, Thomas Keneally published his first novel, The Place at Whitton, in 1964, four years after he abandoned his study for priesthood. The success of that gothic horror set in a seminary triggered a successful writing career of over forty years, in which he produced 25 novels, while making frequent and fruitful incursions into the world of nonfiction. Today Keneally is Australia’s best-known writer and Australia’s living treasure. Although Spielberg’s Schindler’s List became a media event and a household word in the 1990s, it hardly qualified Keneally as an overnight sensation. By that time, Keneally was already a widely acclaimed writer in Britain and America, truly “international”, as the Australians would like to put it, since he had publishers on both sides of the Atlantic and had won the 1982 Booker Prize. Despite discernible changes in his earlier and later works, it’s almost impossible, even as a critical expediency, to divide Keneally’s writing career into clearly marked stages. Writing on both “Australian” and “international” themes, and constantly shifting between past and present, Keneally failed to follow the normal path of arrival, growth and maturity, much to the disappointment of some Australian critics, who eagerly delighted in anticipating the destination of his literary journey...' (Author's introduction)

    Qindao : China Ocean University Press , 2009
    pg. 59-69
Last amended 18 Sep 2015 06:41:03
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