AustLit

'This chapter sets the scene of the book by looking at an angry fax by Peter Carey to Robert McCrum, Faber, and Faber’s editor, about a speech that Carey had given to booksellers and publishers “at a literary dinner” in Sydney in 1988. The image of Australian readers consuming books at a literary dinner becomes Carey’s grudging metaphor for Australia’s consumption of books published by British firms. The literary dinner brings together the agents involved in a set of relations which centres around the identity of the Australian author with all its accompanying baggage, against the demands of a literary marketplace that thrived increasingly on authors as commodified literary celebrities in the 1980s.' (Publication abstract)

'This chapter is a note on the how and the why of my method in dialogue with existing scholarship on Carey. It shows that conceptualising Carey in the context of global literature helps us to appreciate, not only his larger body of work for its complex representation of concurrent cultural economics, but also the ways that the process of production in the publishing industry coalesces with the mechanics of diffusion and the regimes of reception. Here, I broach my central questions: how and, to what extent, can we think of Carey’s fiction and his writerly persona as cultural objects circulating within the global literary marketplace? How does his fiction refract the market forces that manufacture his books and his celebrity? What is the relationship between Carey’s stories and the literary marketplace, between the making of his books and the reading of them? And what possibilities of resistance against the vagaries of neoliberal publishing remain for Carey as an avowedly postcolonial writer? ' (Publication abstract) 

'This chapter aims to reconstruct the various economic and symbolic rewards of publishing Carey’s first collection of short stories, The Fat Man in History (1974). It offers a lateral examination of two interrelated aspects of Carey’s early fiction. It captures a continuum of Australian and transnational practices of literary distinction and advancement governing the success of the University of Queensland Press (UQP) and The Fat Man. These phenomena include the dominance of postmodern critique, governmental patronage of the Australian short story, and the termination of the Traditional Market Agreement. I explore the structural homologies between Carey’s position-takings in the literary field and the ways in which his characters engage with systems of cultural production and consumption. I then examine the evolution of Carey’s literary capital as his medium of publication shifts from literary magazines to UQP books and then onto prestigious international publishers such as Faber and Faber.' (Publication abstract)

'This chapter analyses Carey’s fiction and author-persona in relation to the aesthetic and sociological developments in the increasingly globalising literary marketplace of the 1980s and 1990s. In the previous chapter, I demonstrated that Carey’s entrance into the literary field as the most successful Australian short story writer of his generation was facilitated by developments such as University of Queensland Press’ (UQP) progress as a major publisher of Australian fiction, the establishment of the Literature Board, the ending of the Traditional Markets Agreement, and the rise of the countercultural literary magazine in Australia. In this chapter, Carey’s celebrity in the 1980s and the 1990s will be examined in relation to the politics of literary prizes, the prominence of postcolonial critique, and the changing politics of authorial promotion in the publishing industry.' (Publication abstract)

'The purchase of the documents relating to True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) by the State Library of Victoria amounts to a significant moment in his career. This collection, catalogued as “The Papers and Drafts of Peter Carey,” marks the convergence of canonicity, the literary market, and the materiality of the cultural artefact. This archive adds a new facet to Carey’s image as an Australian author in the public domain, creating a sense of the continuous relevance of Carey’s work to the canon of Australian literature. I demonstrate how the archive is built via the collective recognition of the economic and cultural capital of Carey’s manuscripts and paraphernalia. Through the case study of an agent in constructing the archive, I investigate the stakes invested in Carey’s ongoing dominant position in the Australian literary field into the twenty-first century. This chapter also examines the ways in which agents augment their volume of literary and economic capital through engaging with what I call Carey’s “archival capital.”' (Publication abstract)

'This chapter focuses on three late-career Carey novels, namely My Life as a Fake, Parrot and Olivier in America, and Amnesia, on the thread to complete my analysis of Carey’s ongoing engagement in and around his fiction with the status of the Australian author in the transnational literary marketplace. Carey’s visibility in this period is marked by his shifting position in relation to the globalising publishing industry, the rise of digital publishing, and the mutations of academic and political recognition into convertible cultural capital in the literary field. These changes in practice and modes of recognition are analogous with the aggressive move towards monopoly capitalism by corporate systems in liberal democracies, including Australia.' (Publication abstract)

'This short coda is an apologia disguised as a question. It asks: what’s not in Peter Carey—the name? Descriptors like the national, the global, the celebrity author, all fail to capture the full story: of giving up lucrative careers for writing, of small cruelties along the way, commercially catastrophic novels, the anxieties of dealing with publishers that simply will not take Australian literature seriously—of a whole box of rejection letters in the archive. Somewhere in the recesses of Carey’s fiction lie the story of these sacrifices, compromises, and expectations that slip through the narrative of globalising authorship.' (Publication abstract)