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).