y separately published work icon American Dreams single work   short story  
Issue Details: First known date: 1974... 1974 American Dreams
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Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Fat Man in History : Short Stories Peter Carey , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1974 Z199916 1974 selected work short story science fiction satire

    'A collection of surrealistic stories set in the near future centers on such bizarre events as a genetic lottery for winning new bodies and a revolution organized by a group of ostracized fat men.' (Source: TROVE)

    St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1974
    pg. 101-113
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Most Beautiful Lies : A Collection of Stories by Five Major Contemporary Fiction Writers: Bail, Carey, Lurie, Moorhouse and Wilding Brian Kiernan (editor), Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1977 Z525281 1977 anthology short story humour satire science fiction Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1977 pg. 65-76
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Fat Man in History Peter Carey , London : Faber , 1980 Z866366 1980 selected work short story London : Faber , 1980
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The First UQP Story Book Craig Munro (editor), St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1981 Z329527 1981 anthology short story St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1981 pg. 38-51
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Short Stories Kerryn Goldsworthy (editor), Melbourne : J. M. Dent , 1983 Z411278 1983 anthology short story extract Melbourne : J. M. Dent , 1983 pg. 357-368
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Impressions on a Continent : A Collection of Australian Short Stories Bill Scott , Richmond : Heinemann Australia , 1983 Z1400804 1983 anthology short story Richmond : Heinemann Australia , 1983 pg. 47-57
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories Murray Bail (editor), London : Faber , 1988 Z356335 1988 anthology short story humour science fiction (taught in 1 units)

    'Collects representative short stories by Christina Stead, Peter Cowan, David Malouf, Peter Carey, and Kate Grenville' 

    London : Faber , 1988
    pg. 331-342
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Personal Best : Thirty Australian Authors Choose Their Best Short Stories Garry Disher , Sydney : Collins , 1989 Z468599 1989 anthology short story autobiography biography humour Sydney : Collins , 1989 pg. 56-70
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Fat Man in History Peter Carey , London : Faber , 1980 Z866366 1980 selected work short story St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1990 pg. 151-162
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Literature : An Anthology of Writing from the Land Down Under Phyllis Fahrie Edelson (editor), New York (City) : Ballantine Books , 1993 Z110937 1993 anthology short story criticism extract biography 'Spanning more than a century, Australian Literature crystallizes a spirit, style, and ethos found nowhere else in world literature. These captivating selections in Australian Literature come from major voices, both famous and lesser known, and encompass short stories, memoirs, novels and aboriginal writings. Resonant or wryly witty, charming or disturbing, they explore themes deeply rooted in the Australian experience—shaping the land, the legacies of the convict past, the displacement of the aborigine, the search for a national identity, sex, love, and commitment.' (Publication summary)
     
    New York (City) : Ballantine Books , 1993
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Collected Stories Peter Carey , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1994 Z389275 1994 selected work short story satire science fiction (taught in 1 units) St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 1994 pg. 171-181
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Contemporary Classics 65-95 : The Best Australian Short Fiction 1965-1995 Don Anderson (editor), Milsons Point : Vintage Australia , 1996 Z254156 1996 anthology short story poetry extract Milsons Point : Vintage Australia , 1996 pg. 112-128
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Secret Lives : Thirty-four Modern Australian Short Stories Barry Oakley (editor), Rowville : Five Mile Press , 2003 Z1073789 2003 anthology short story autobiography prose Rowville : Five Mile Press , 2003 pg. 223-238
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Penguin Book of the Road Delia Falconer (editor), Camberwell : Viking , 2008 Z1532526 2008 anthology short story biography travel

    'Australia is a nation of drivers. We spend more time behind the wheel than almost anyone else, on fast highways, lonely bush tracks, jammed city lanes and suburban streets. The road is the place where the great dramas of our lives unfold, the route to our greatest pleasures as well as our worst nightmares. It is sexy, dangerous and unnerving.

    'In this landmark collection, acclaimed novelist and essayist Delia Falconer brings together some of our very best writing on every aspect of the road.' (Publisher's blurb)

    Camberwell : Viking , 2008
    pg. 95-109
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon A World of Difference : An Anthology of Short Stories From Five Continents Lynda Prescott (editor), Houndmills New York (City) Milton Keynes : Palgrave Macmillan Open University , 2008 Z1542653 2008 anthology short story Houndmills New York (City) Milton Keynes : Palgrave Macmillan Open University , 2008 pg. 147-162
    Note: Includes a (biographical) Introduction by the editor (pp 149-150).
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature Nicholas Jose (editor), Kerryn Goldsworthy (editor), Anita Heiss (editor), David McCooey (editor), Peter Minter (editor), Nicole Moore (editor), Elizabeth Webby (editor), Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2009 Z1590615 2009 anthology correspondence diary drama essay extract poetry prose short story (taught in 23 units)

    'Some of the best, most significant writing produced in Australia over more than two centuries is gathered in this landmark anthology. Covering all genres - from fiction, poetry and drama to diaries, letters, essays and speeches - the anthology maps the development of one of the great literatures in English in all its energy and variety.

    'The writing reflects the diverse experiences of Australians in their encounter with their extraordinary environment and with themselves. This is literature of struggle, conflict and creative survival. It is literature of lives lived at the extremes, of frontiers between cultures, of new dimensions of experience, where imagination expands.

    'This rich, informative and entertaining collection charts the formation of an Australian voice that draws inventively on Indigenous words, migrant speech and slang, with a cheeky, subversive humour always to the fore. For the first time, Aboriginal writings are interleaved with other English-language writings throughout - from Bennelong's 1796 letter to the contemporary flowering of Indigenous fiction and poetry - setting up an exchange that reveals Australian history in stark new ways.

    'From vivid settler accounts to haunting gothic tales, from raw protest to feisty urban satire and playful literary experiment, from passionate love poetry to moving memoir, the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature reflects the creative eloquence of a society.

    'Chosen by a team of expert editors, who have provided illuminating essays about their selections, and with more than 500 works from over 300 authors, it is an authoritative survey and a rich world of reading to be enjoyed.' (Publisher's blurb)

    Allen and Unwin have a YouTube channel with a number of useful videos on the Anthology.

    Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2009
    pg. 1043-1052

Works about this Work

Covert Modernist Techniques in Australian Fiction : A Systemic Functional Reading of Peter Carey’s American Dreams Martin Tilney , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: Language, Context and Text , vol. 1 no. 2 2019; (p. 313-340)

'Peter Carey’s short story American dreams (Carey 1994 [1974]) presents a recalibration of consciousness as a small Australian town gradually becomes Americanized. The text foregrounds epistemological concerns by demonstrating a clear tendency toward delayed understanding. For this reason, I argue that the story is an instance of modernist fiction: a label not previously applied to Carey’s stories. In contrast with popular modernist techniques such as free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, the techniques presented in the text appear to be covert, which may at least partially explain why the story has managed to avoid being labelled modernist by literary critics until now. Using analytical tools grounded in systemic functional grammar and appraisal categories, I demonstrate how linguistic analysis can lay bare the covert modernist techniques at work in the story, indicating that such an approach can be a useful complement to non-linguistic literary criticism.' (Publication abstract)

Antipodal Propinquities? : Environmental (Mis)Perceptions in American and Australian Literary History Lawrence Buell , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Reading Across the Pacific : Australia-United States Intellectual Histories 2010; (p. 3-22)
This paper focuses on certain challenges for environmental memory that seem to follow from historic quasi-affinities of Australia and the United States as Anglocentric settler cultures with longstanding frontier/outback traditions driven by boom-and-bust capitalism that in modern times have become much more self-consciously multi-cultural, much more urbanized, and much more ecologically self-conscious.
Specific issues discussed will include the quest for fuller recuperation of the ecocultural past (imagining ethno-racial and biodiversity across much longer horizons of time and space than colonial/national) and the proclivity for representing inland space as remote, opaque, gothic. Writers engaged during the course of the lecture may include Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Linda Hogan, Barry Lopez, William Least Heat Moon; Barbara Baynton, Patrick White (Author's abstract)
Cartographic Conspiracies: Maps, Misinformation, and Exploitation in Peter Carey's 'American Dreams' Nicholas Dunlop , 2008 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 22 no. 1 2008; (p. 33-39)

Nicholas Dunlop discusses the 'difficulties inherent in transferring or compressing our own epistemologies of space and time into a static, two-dimensional model' - the map. In this context he examines Peter Carey's American Dreams as 'a useful introduction to the ways in which Carey's work frequently questions the use of the cartographic metaphor for the pursuit or maintenance of individual or hegemonic agendas'.

Dunlop concludes: 'American Dreams ... articulates the ways in which the manipulation of maps ... may affect cultural realities and how that culture perceives its spatial boundaries and the individuals within it'.

Publish - Then Edit and Be Damned Jane Sullivan , 2008 single work column
— Appears in: The Age , 17 May 2008; (p. 28)
Multiculturalism in Contemporary Australian Fiction Pradeep Trikha , 2006 single work criticism
— Appears in: Caring Cultures : Sharing Imaginations : Australia and India 2006; (p. 142-152)
The author reads a selection of contemporary Australian short stories for their portrayal of multiculturalism.
Untitled Nola Allen , 1997 single work review
— Appears in: Magpies : Talking About Books for Children , May vol. 12 no. 2 1997; (p. 37)

— Review of American Dreams Peter Carey , 1974 single work short story
Fantabulous and Fantastic Linnet Hunter , 1997 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 26-27 April 1997; (p. rev 7)

— Review of The Family Frying Pan Bryce Courtenay , 1997 selected work short story prose ; American Dreams Peter Carey , 1974 single work short story
Peter Carey's Short Stories : Trapped in a Narrative Labyrinth Cornelia Schulze , 2005 single work criticism
— Appears in: Fabulating Beauty : Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey 2005; (p. 117-136)
Schulze considers situations of confinement in some of Carey's short stories, 'laying special emphasis on Carey's strategy of entrapping his readers in narrative labyrinths, a manoeuvre [seen as] having a didactic purpose: that of increasing one's awareness of linguistic manipulation' (Introduction to Fabulating Beauty xxx).
Multiculturalism in Contemporary Australian Fiction Pradeep Trikha , 2006 single work criticism
— Appears in: Caring Cultures : Sharing Imaginations : Australia and India 2006; (p. 142-152)
The author reads a selection of contemporary Australian short stories for their portrayal of multiculturalism.
Publish - Then Edit and Be Damned Jane Sullivan , 2008 single work column
— Appears in: The Age , 17 May 2008; (p. 28)
Cartographic Conspiracies: Maps, Misinformation, and Exploitation in Peter Carey's 'American Dreams' Nicholas Dunlop , 2008 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 22 no. 1 2008; (p. 33-39)

Nicholas Dunlop discusses the 'difficulties inherent in transferring or compressing our own epistemologies of space and time into a static, two-dimensional model' - the map. In this context he examines Peter Carey's American Dreams as 'a useful introduction to the ways in which Carey's work frequently questions the use of the cartographic metaphor for the pursuit or maintenance of individual or hegemonic agendas'.

Dunlop concludes: 'American Dreams ... articulates the ways in which the manipulation of maps ... may affect cultural realities and how that culture perceives its spatial boundaries and the individuals within it'.

Antipodal Propinquities? : Environmental (Mis)Perceptions in American and Australian Literary History Lawrence Buell , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Reading Across the Pacific : Australia-United States Intellectual Histories 2010; (p. 3-22)
This paper focuses on certain challenges for environmental memory that seem to follow from historic quasi-affinities of Australia and the United States as Anglocentric settler cultures with longstanding frontier/outback traditions driven by boom-and-bust capitalism that in modern times have become much more self-consciously multi-cultural, much more urbanized, and much more ecologically self-conscious.
Specific issues discussed will include the quest for fuller recuperation of the ecocultural past (imagining ethno-racial and biodiversity across much longer horizons of time and space than colonial/national) and the proclivity for representing inland space as remote, opaque, gothic. Writers engaged during the course of the lecture may include Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Linda Hogan, Barry Lopez, William Least Heat Moon; Barbara Baynton, Patrick White (Author's abstract)
Last amended 15 Feb 2024 12:49:32
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