Issue Details: First known date: 2010... 2010 Strategies of an Illywhacker (III) : Telling History as Story
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

‘Original storytelling is one of the marker traits of Peter Carey’s fictions: it is this characteristic that explains why there is no such thing as a typical Carey novel, only certain features and concerns which recur throughout his fictions.’ (p 84)

Notes

  • Epigraph: And while we fret and writhe in bandaged uncertainty…we fabulate. We make up a story to cover the facts we don’t know or can’t accept; we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history. – Julian Barnes

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Rewriting History : Peter Carey's Fictional Biography of Australia Andreas Gaile , Amsterdam : Rodopi , 2010 Z1711490 2010 single work criticism

    'Peter Carey is one of the most richly awarded and critically acclaimed novelists of the present day. Most of his fictions relate to questions of Australian history and identity. Rewriting History argues that taken together Carey's novels make up a fictional biography of Australia. The reading proposed here considers both key events in the life of the subject of Carey's biography (such as the exploration of the interior of the continent, the dispossession of the Aborigines, the convict experience, the process of Australia's coming of age as a postcolonial country) as well as its identity.

    Rewriting History demonstrates how Carey exposes the lies and deceptions that make up the traditional representations of Australian history and supplants them with a new national story - one that because of its fictional status is not bound to the rigidities of traditional historical discourse. At a time of momentous cultural change, when Australia is being transformed from a "New Britannia in another world" to a nation not merely in, but actually of the Asia-Pacific region, Carey's fiction, this book argues, calls for the construction of a postcolonial national identity that acknowledges the wrongs of the past and gives Australians a sense of cultural orientation between their British past and their multicultural present. Source: www.rodopi.nl/ (Sighted 27/07/2010).

    Amsterdam : Rodopi , 2010
    pg. 83-104
Last amended 30 Nov 2010 11:08:05
83-104 Strategies of an Illywhacker (III) : Telling History as Storysmall AustLit logo
Subjects:
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X