"The Past Is A Foreign Country" single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2009... 2009 "The Past Is A Foreign Country"
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

Introduction to chapter four.

Notes

  • Epigraph:

    The past in history varies with the present, rests upon the present, is the present…There are not two worlds—the world of past happenings and the world of our present knowledge of those past events—there is only one world, and it is the world of present experience. —- Michael Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes

    Just as memory validates personal identity, history perpetuates collective self-awareness. —-David Lowenthal, The Past Is A Foreign Country

    Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. —-Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • 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. 94-95
Last amended 18 Sep 2015 06:53:18
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