Description
Book SynopsisPeter 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.
Trade ReviewShortlisted for the McRae Award 2011. From the Judges’ Report: "Re-writing History is an impressive tribute to Carey’s contribution to a ‘nascent mythology’ (rather than a revisionist history) via his complex fictions. Responding to the already fine and far-ranging analysis of Carey’s fiction from Australian and international scholars, Gaile is erudite in his examination of Carey’s Australian novels and their use of post-modernist literary tricks of fabulation, magic realism and metafiction. He offers a valuable re-reading of Carey’s use of these strategies as postmodernism with ‘moral concern’ tied to an ‘emancipatory vision’ of Australia’s history."
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction Theoretical Premises Rewriting History: Theoretical Premises Theorizing Carey’s Fictional Biography After the Grand Narratives: From History to Mythistory Strategies of an Illywhacker (I): Replacing the Truth-Paradigm with a “Weaseling Kind of ‘Truth’” Strategies of an Illywhacker (II): Transcending Historical Reality Strategies of an Illywhacker (III): Telling History as Story Carey’s Biography of Australia: Key Events in the Life of a Nation Dissecting the Lies of Terra Nullius: The Nightmare of Aboriginal History Deconstructing Leichhardt: Peter Carey and the Explorer Myth “Decolonizing the Mind” (I): Colonial Australia “Decolonizing the Mind” (II): Postcolonial Australia Carey’s Biography of Australia: Australian Identity “Trying to Make Out the Southern Cross”, Or, The Dilemma of Australian Identity The Real Matilda: Re-Inscribing the “Pygmies” of Australian Culture Intruders in the Bush: Women in Male Domains Postscript Wrong About Carey? Reading Carey in Post-Postmodern Times Bibliography Index
