Historical fiction
Articles
- William Hay and History : A Comment on Aims, Sources and Method
Challenges H.M. Green’s judgement that William Gosse Hay’s talent was ‘not of the first order, even by Australian standards’. Investigates the basis of this reputation…
1 December 1965 - ‘The Great Australian Emptiness’ Revisited: Murray Bail’s Holden’s Performance
If, as Dean MacCannell argues, tourism is the quest for a 'reality' and an 'authenticity' that are thought to be always 'elsewhere' (160), then it…
1 May 1991 - Ambivalence, Absence and Loss in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon
‘In this essay I aim to acknowledge the efficacy of the liberal humanist discourse in Remembering Babylon, whilst interrogating some of its more problematic…
1 June 2009 - When ‘History Changes Who We Were’
Review essay on Searching for the Secret River, by Kate Grenville, Agamemnon's Kiss: Selected Essays, by Inga Clendinnen, The History Question: Who Owns…
1 November 2008 - Getting a Head: Dismembering and Remembering in Robert Drewe’s The Savage Crows
The article examines the use of bodily metaphors of dismemberment and beheading in Drewe’s novel about the fate of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, The Savage…
1 May 2003 - Wishing for Modernity: Temporality and Desire in Gould’s Book of Fish
Shipway’s article examines Flanagan’s representation of Tasmanian versions of history and modernity in Gould’s Book of Fish. As one of the recurring tropes in…
1 May 2003 - Challenging History Making: Realism, Revolution and Utopia in The Timeless Land
Among the many historical novels written in Australia during the thirties and forties, The Timeless Land is unique for the way it foregrounds the journals…
1 May 1995 - Gossip and History in the Novels of Brian Penton and Thomas Keneally
The study of gossip as a cultural practice, as distinct from its condemnation as a moral evil, has not long been established; not, at least…
1 October 1990 - Allegory, Space, Colonialism: Remembering Babylon and the Production of Colonial History
Remembering Babylon, with its strange and compelling story of Gemmy Fairley's negotiation between 'Australian' and 'Aboriginal' identities, is, like 'The Writing Lesson', simultaneously an…
1 October 1995 - An Interview with Thomas Keneally
Thomas Keneally discusses his literary interest in war and history, his work's relationship to Australian literature more broadly, and his process of turning fact into…
1 October 1986 - Jimmy Governor and Jimmie Blacksmith
Historian Henry Reynolds examines the historical background of and model for Keneally’s novel and focuses on four things: “to outline the general background to race…
1 May 1979 - Rewriting the Past: Exploration and Discovery in The Transit of Venus
The disruptiveness of The Transit of Venus can clearly be detected in Hazzard's treatment of history; in the way she explores the connections between the…
1 May 1992 - Rolf Boldrewood’s War to the Knife: Narrative Form and Ideology in the Historical Novel
In The Historical Novel, Georg Lukacs suggested that Sir Walter Scott's limited understanding of the historical present did not prevent him, as a writer…
1 May 1986 - ‘The Critics Made Me’: The Receptions of Thomas Keneally and Australian Literary Culture
While Thomas Keneally himself generously acknowledges that 'the critics made me' (Pierce, Interview), few Australian authors - in the course of long, productive and internationally…
1 May 1995 - Roy Bridge’s Fictions of Van Diemen’s Land
Had he been on their case, one can imagine F.R. Leavis intoning 'We will not reckon Bryce Courtenay a writer of historical fiction to appeal…
1 October 2000 - Preying on the Past: Contexts of Some Recent Neo-Historical Fiction
Discusses the 'revisionist' historical fiction of, among others, Rodney Hall, David Malouf and Robert Drewe, in the context of Australian historical fiction from its origins…
1 October 1992 - The Sites of War in the Fiction of Thomas Keneally
That war is both a monstrous, but an ineradicably human activity a horror for individuals but an essential element in the making and memory of…
1 October 1986 - Gambling on Reality: A Reading of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda
Discusses Oscar and Lucinda as a post-modern historical novel. 'Inhabiting the genre it wants to deconstruct, i.e. the nineteenth-century historical novel, it undermines its basic…
1 June 1991 - Constructing Cosmopolitanism, Promoting Humanitarianism: The Marvellous Melbourne of E.W. Cole in Lisa Lang’s Utopian Man (2010)
Lisa Lang’s award-winning Australian novel Utopian Man (2010) reimagines E.W. Cole and his famous Book Arcade in Melbourne in the last decades of the nineteenth…
19 September 2017
Contributors
- Patrick Buckridge
- Robert Dixon
- Brenton Doecke
- Robert Dixon
- Alice Healy
- Jo Jones
- Thomas Keneally
- I. D. Muecke
- Susan K. Martin
- Kate Mitchell
- Brigitta Olubas
- Peter Pierce
- Peter Pierce
- Peter Pierce
- Peter Pierce
- Kirsten Holst Petersen
- Henry Reynolds
- Jesse Shipway
- Lee Spinks