Cirrus@Austlit

Author's abstract: Rewriting Dickens's Great Expectations through Jack Maggs, Carey revisits the English literary heritage and the values of nineteenth-century England. This paper examines how Carey reconsiders that tradition and, from his postcolonial position, questions Britain's cultural and social heritage to present Australia as a new haven offering redemption and regeneration, the possibility of overcoming the haunting heritage of one's origins and past, which allegorically refers to the former colony itself (63).

Author's abstract: 'Bliss, Peter Carey's first published novel, is the manifesto of a postcolonial writer who believes it necessary to constitute a new cultural heritage both to cure the postcolonial society of its cultural inferiority complex and to protect the new community against neo-imperialism. It is also Carey's ars poetica, which sets out how he will go about constructing an Australian literary heritage in his coming novels' (p.77).

Author's abstract: 'A major preoccupation in David Malouf's fiction - particularly in evidence in Remembering Babylon but also in An Imaginary Life - has to do with the relationship between words and things, and with the quest for a kind of language that might be in complete harmony with reality.

At times, Malouf seems to believe this quest can be successful, in spite of the arbitrary and conventional nature of language. But this conviction is undermined by the realisation that language gives shape to reality as we see it, that it is creative rather than simply referential' (99).