After the Celebration : Australian Fiction 1989-2007
Carlton
:
Melbourne University Press
,
2009
Z1553982
2009
selected work
criticism
'After the Celebration explores Australian fiction from 1989 to 2007, after Australia's bicentenary to the end of the Howard government. In this literary history, Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman combine close attention to Australian novels with a vivid depiction of their contexts: cultural, social, political, historical, national and transnational.
'From crime fiction to the postmodern colonial novel, from Australian grunge to 'rural apocalypse fiction', from the Asian diasporic novel to the action blockbuster, Gelder and Salzman show how Australian novelists such as Frank Moorhouse, Elizabeth Jolley, Peter Carey, Kim Scott, Steven Carroll, Kate Grenville, Tim Winton, Alexis Wright and many others have used their work to chart our position in the world.
'The literary controversies over history, identity, feminism and gatekeeping are read against the politics of the day. Provocative and compelling, After the Celebration captures the key themes and issues in Australian fiction: where we have been and what we have become.' (Publisher's blurb)
'Postcolonialism may be defined as a theoretical framework for reading and appreciating cultural production between normative Western "forms of social explanation" and "more complex cultural and political boundaries" that demarcate responses to this normativity (Bhabha 248) As such, this framework has been extremely beneficial for, among other things, introducing and highlighting the work of writers from non-Western cultural backgrounds, particularly Indigenous and multicultural or diasporic writers whose works convey conceptual and aesthetic themes and values at once foreign and responsive to Western European literary modalities. Thanks to postcolonial theory and associated methodologies, a very diverse range of writers from a host of cultural origins and locations has been accepted by and incorporated into most, if not all, Western academic and literary milieus.' (Authors' introduction.)
'Postcolonialism may be defined as a theoretical framework for reading and appreciating cultural production between normative Western "forms of social explanation" and "more complex cultural and political boundaries" that demarcate responses to this normativity (Bhabha 248) As such, this framework has been extremely beneficial for, among other things, introducing and highlighting the work of writers from non-Western cultural backgrounds, particularly Indigenous and multicultural or diasporic writers whose works convey conceptual and aesthetic themes and values at once foreign and responsive to Western European literary modalities. Thanks to postcolonial theory and associated methodologies, a very diverse range of writers from a host of cultural origins and locations has been accepted by and incorporated into most, if not all, Western academic and literary milieus.' (Authors' introduction.)
