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When Novels Perform History : Dramatizing the Past in Australian and Canadian Literature
multi chapter work
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'How do you bring history alive? This book explores the use of dramatic modes – such as melodrama, metatheatre, and immersion – to bring immediacy and a sense of living presence to works of literature rooted in history. Focusing on Australian and Canadian literature from the late 1980s to the present, the book features original research on novels by award-winning writers such as David Musgrave, Richard Flanagan, Daphne Marlatt, Peter Carey, Tomson Highway, Thomas Keneally, and Guy Vanderhaeghe. The analysis addresses how these writers use strategies from drama and theatre to engage with colonial and postcolonial histories in their novels and create resonant connections with readers. Some of the novels encourage readers to imagine themselves in historical roles through intimate dramatizations inside characters’ minds and bodies. Others use exaggerated theatrical frames to place readers at a critical distance from representations of history using Brechtian techniques of alienation. This book explores the use of dramatic modes to enliven and reimagine settler-invader history and bring colonial and postcolonial histories closer to the present.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Rebecca Waese. When Novels Perform History : Dramatizing the Past in Australian and Canadian Literature.
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 22 no. 1 2022;
— Review of When Novels Perform History : Dramatizing the Past in Australian and Canadian Literature 2017 multi chapter work criticism 'The title of Rebecca Waese’s book, When Novels Perform History: Dramatizing the Past in Australian and Canadian Literature (2017) pretty much explains what the work sets out to do. When Novels Perform History consists of a series of readings of selected novels that, on their own, generally support the claims made about the way some works of fiction foreground the power and effect of drama and performance to complicate, revise or reimagine the past as recorded in settler colonies. In Waese’s own words, she explores how ‘[d]ramatic modes of fiction about the past often heighten perceptions of immediacy and sensory awareness by creating a sense of immersion or embodiment in a particular historical scene’ (1). Apart from the Introduction, there are six chapters alternating between Australian and Canadian novels.'(Introduction)
-
Rebecca Waese. When Novels Perform History : Dramatizing the Past in Australian and Canadian Literature.
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 22 no. 1 2022;
— Review of When Novels Perform History : Dramatizing the Past in Australian and Canadian Literature 2017 multi chapter work criticism 'The title of Rebecca Waese’s book, When Novels Perform History: Dramatizing the Past in Australian and Canadian Literature (2017) pretty much explains what the work sets out to do. When Novels Perform History consists of a series of readings of selected novels that, on their own, generally support the claims made about the way some works of fiction foreground the power and effect of drama and performance to complicate, revise or reimagine the past as recorded in settler colonies. In Waese’s own words, she explores how ‘[d]ramatic modes of fiction about the past often heighten perceptions of immediacy and sensory awareness by creating a sense of immersion or embodiment in a particular historical scene’ (1). Apart from the Introduction, there are six chapters alternating between Australian and Canadian novels.'(Introduction)
