Cirrus@Austlit

As allusions to Christian tradition are a recurrent and prominent feature in Carey's work, the author of this article discusses them with regard to their function as thematic feature and as narrational devices or formal feature. Larsson's careful reading shows that several of Carey's novels are 'more firmly rooted in the Christian tradition than the author's self-conception as "an atheist" and the postcolonial condemnation of totalizing, essentialist narratives would lead one to believe' (Introduction to Fabulating Beauty xxx).

Discusses one of the most conspicuous motifs in Carey's fictions (and in postcolonial literatures in general): that of captivity.

Argues that 'the film adaptations of Carey's fiction seem to pull the work away from the postmodern aesthetic and, as a consequence, away from what Carey was positing through its use. The films offer something more modern or realistic, thereby confusing or altering Carey's themes' (81).

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).

'Jose, as fellow novelist, considers Carey's position in the world of Australian letters, recalling the cultural atmosphere of the early 1980s, when Bliss was first published. From Jose's critical appraisal Carey emerges not only as a "literary Houdini" but also as a writer whose fiction "broke new ground" at the time, signifying a "break from the shackling domination of literary London"' (Introduction to Fabulating Beauty xxxi).

A poststrucural reading of Carey's novel which considers the novel as 'an exercise in bricolage', and compares it with some of Murray Bail's texts.

McCredden 'analyses how Carey handles "sacredness" in the context of a novel that is largely informed by the postcolonial view of Christendom as an essentially alien presence in the Australian context' (Introduction to Fabulating Beauty xxxi).

Nünning 'explores the postmodern and postcolonial concept of history underlying the novel and shows how Carey, through formal, thematic and theoretical manoeuvres, renews the genre of the historical novel as such and re-examines received notions of Australian history' (Introduction to Fabulating Beauty xxxi).

Discusses the novel's treatment of postcolonial issues in Australian culture. 'Ashcroft focuses on the postcolonial struggle over representation as it is played out in the novel and presents a reading in Baudrillardian terms, looking at the novel's "consuming cultural thesis [...] that all culture, identity, and the power relationships they invoke are a product of simulation"' (Introduction to Fabulating Beauty xxxi-xxxii).

'This essay explores Carey's debt to Dickens, his re-creation of historical London, and his metafictional blending of narratives. In addition, it sounds out the question of whether Carey's narrative transforms this material from an impersonal into an Aussie story' (227).

'In her reading of the novel, [Schmidt-Haberkamp] shows how in Carey's novel the sequence of original text [Dickens's Great Expectations] and postcolonial reaction to it, which is central to the writing-back paradigm, are inverted' (Introduction to Fabulating Beauty xxxii).

Discusses intertextual relations between Jack Maggs and Karl Marx's Das Kapital.

The critical intention of this article is to examine 'storytelling and/or the inhabiting of cultural masterplots as sites at which characters (and finally, inevitably, the author himself) are faced with the challenge of seeking or escaping authentic selfhood or existential good faith, in the Sartrean sense' (276).

Martin 'reads the novel as an exemplar of a particular subset of Australian historical fiction, novels that stage a search for white male heterosexual heroes. Kelly is a particularly interesting example, because his whiteness and maleness, along with his heterosexuality and his heroism, have been more or less vehemently contested (and continue to be so in the novel).' (Introduction to Fabulating Beuaty xxxiii).\