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'The Australian Novelist Patrick White (1912-1990) is celebrated for the breadth and profundity of his vision of man and for the epic implications of his thematic concerns: the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973 was one reflection of these directions in critical interest. At the same time, consideration of White's work has frequently been characterized by a "schizophrenic" attitude (overt or subliminal) towards those aspects of his art by which he himself laid greatest store: the mode of storytelling. White is too often held to be a "mannered" and "idiosyncratic" writer, a pretentious and even clumsy stylist with a predilection for authorial intrusiveness. In this study, original techniques of linguistic and narrative analysis are brought to bear on White's remarkable style, in order to call such judgements into question. White's readers and critics, it is argued, are often the victims of their own projections and misplaced assumptions about the nature of narrative process. Attention is also devoted to questions of 'twice-telling" and intertextuality, and a new, "indexical" procedure is suggested for coping with White's techniques of figuration. White's affinities with such writers as Dostoevsky, James and Faulkner are examined contrastively, with a view to classifying him as preeminently a novelist of consciousness, rather than of "character" and "morality". One central novel, The Solid Mandala, is submitted to full-scale analysis: also extensively discussed are The Tree of Man, Riders in the Chariot, and The Twyborn Affair.' (Publication summary)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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The Solid Mandala and Patrick White’s Late Modernity
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Transnational Literature , November vol. 4 no. 1 2011; 'This essay contends that the Australian novelist Patrick White (1912-1990) presents, in his novel The Solid Mandala (1966), a prototypical evocation of late modernity that indicates precisely why and how it was different from the neoliberal and postmodern era that succeeded it. Late modernity is currently emerging as a historical period, though still a nascent and contested one. Robert Hassan speaks of the 1950-1970 era as a period which, in its 'Fordist' mode of production maintained a certain conformity yet held off the commoditisation of later neoliberalism's 'network-driven capitalism'. This anchors the sense of 'late modernity,' that will operate in this essay, though my sense of the period also follows on definitions of the term established, in very different contexts, by Edward Lucie-Smith and Tyrus Miller.' (Author's introduction)
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Monumental Study Finds Words to Explain Patrick White's Novels
1993
single work
review
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 7 no. 1 1993; (p. 83)
— Review of The Rocks and Sticks of Words: Style, Discourse and Narrative Structure in the Fiction of Patrick White 1992 multi chapter work criticism criticism
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Monumental Study Finds Words to Explain Patrick White's Novels
1993
single work
review
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 7 no. 1 1993; (p. 83)
— Review of The Rocks and Sticks of Words: Style, Discourse and Narrative Structure in the Fiction of Patrick White 1992 multi chapter work criticism criticism -
The Solid Mandala and Patrick White’s Late Modernity
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Transnational Literature , November vol. 4 no. 1 2011; 'This essay contends that the Australian novelist Patrick White (1912-1990) presents, in his novel The Solid Mandala (1966), a prototypical evocation of late modernity that indicates precisely why and how it was different from the neoliberal and postmodern era that succeeded it. Late modernity is currently emerging as a historical period, though still a nascent and contested one. Robert Hassan speaks of the 1950-1970 era as a period which, in its 'Fordist' mode of production maintained a certain conformity yet held off the commoditisation of later neoliberalism's 'network-driven capitalism'. This anchors the sense of 'late modernity,' that will operate in this essay, though my sense of the period also follows on definitions of the term established, in very different contexts, by Edward Lucie-Smith and Tyrus Miller.' (Author's introduction)
- The Solid Mandala 1966 single work novel
- The Twyborn Affair 1979 single work novel
- Riders in the Chariot 1961 single work novel
- The Tree of Man 1955 single work novel