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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
Contains the following chapters: 1. Imperialism and Textuality -- 2. Colonialist Concerns -- 3. The Stirrings of New Nationalism -- 4. Metropolitans and Mimics -- 5. Independence -- 6. Postcolonialism and Beyond.
In this book, Elleke Boehmer looks challengingly at the history of postcolonial writing, how it developed and how it departs from writing in the Empire in the Victorian period. Throughout this literature key themes and images - journeying, loss, the search for community, the arrival of the stranger - are expanded and redefined. Boehmer discusses these with reference to a broad range of texts, from Trollope, Kipling, Orwell, D. H. Lawrence, and Katherine Mansfield, to authors as recent as Ben Okri and Michael Ondaatje, and the Aboriginal Australians Sally Morgan and Mudrooroo.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Big Father is Watching You : A Postcolonial Reading of Peter Kocan's Total Institution Novellas
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 26 no. 1 2012; (p. 61-66) 'Born in 1947, Peter Kocan went down in the history of Australian fiction for having written a pair of companion novellas that are largely inspired from his experience as an inmate when he was incarcerated at Long Bay Correctional Center (Sydney) and then confined in Ward 6 for the Criminally Insane in Morrisset Psycological Hospital (New South Wales). When he turned 19, he attempted to shoot dead the then-leader of the Australian Labor Party Arthur Calwell with a sawn-off .22 rifle. At the time of the trial he was diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic and condemned to life imprisonment, a sentence that was commuted to ten years of treatment that gave him and insiders knowledge of psychiatric institutions. Published after a time when asylum narratives were starting to make their mark in Australian fiction with novels such as David Ireland's The Flesheaters (1972) and Walter Adamson's The Institution (1976), The Treatment (1980) and its sequel The Cure (1983) chronicle Len Tarbutt's institutionalisation - a nineteen-year-old youngster confined in the maximum-security cell of a mental hospital to serve a life sentence. On another level, these two second-person semi-fictions can also be interpreted as a national allegory of Australian penal settlement, which explicates the ruler-ruled relationship through the establishment of a panoptic repressive system.' (Author's introduction)
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David Malouf's Haunted Writing
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Postcolonial Ghosts 2010; (p. 269-285) 'The two novels this paper focuses on, Remembering Babylon and The Conversations at Curlow Creek, testify to David Malouf's ongoing 'dialogue with Australia'. Published in 1993 and 1996, two centuries after the arrival of the First Fleet of convicts, they engage with crucial issues in a postcolonial Australia which still has to negotiate its existential uncertainty. By returning to the first half of the nineteenth century, the narratives face the ghosts of the past which have haunted Australia, notably the stain of its origins as a penal colony: a sense of exile to the edge of the world is combined with the legacy of historical wrongs, the atrocities of the convict system and the devastating impact of colonization on the Aboriginal peoples - from dispossession to massacre or assimilationist policies which have engendered social alienation and spiritual dislocation.' (p. 270)
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The Postcolonial Screen : Elaborate Forgeries in Rodney Hall’s The Second Bridegroom
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature 2010; (p. 237-253) -
Spaces of Hybridity : Creating a Sense of Belonging through Spatial Awareness
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature 2010; (p. 93-107) -
Untitled
2001
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Studies , Winter vol. 16 no. 2 2001; (p. 173-174)
— Review of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature : Migrant Metaphors 1995 multi chapter work criticism
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Untitled
2001
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Studies , Winter vol. 16 no. 2 2001; (p. 173-174)
— Review of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature : Migrant Metaphors 1995 multi chapter work criticism -
Spaces of Hybridity : Creating a Sense of Belonging through Spatial Awareness
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature 2010; (p. 93-107) -
The Postcolonial Screen : Elaborate Forgeries in Rodney Hall’s The Second Bridegroom
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature 2010; (p. 237-253) -
David Malouf's Haunted Writing
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Postcolonial Ghosts 2010; (p. 269-285) 'The two novels this paper focuses on, Remembering Babylon and The Conversations at Curlow Creek, testify to David Malouf's ongoing 'dialogue with Australia'. Published in 1993 and 1996, two centuries after the arrival of the First Fleet of convicts, they engage with crucial issues in a postcolonial Australia which still has to negotiate its existential uncertainty. By returning to the first half of the nineteenth century, the narratives face the ghosts of the past which have haunted Australia, notably the stain of its origins as a penal colony: a sense of exile to the edge of the world is combined with the legacy of historical wrongs, the atrocities of the convict system and the devastating impact of colonization on the Aboriginal peoples - from dispossession to massacre or assimilationist policies which have engendered social alienation and spiritual dislocation.' (p. 270)
-
Big Father is Watching You : A Postcolonial Reading of Peter Kocan's Total Institution Novellas
2012
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 26 no. 1 2012; (p. 61-66) 'Born in 1947, Peter Kocan went down in the history of Australian fiction for having written a pair of companion novellas that are largely inspired from his experience as an inmate when he was incarcerated at Long Bay Correctional Center (Sydney) and then confined in Ward 6 for the Criminally Insane in Morrisset Psycological Hospital (New South Wales). When he turned 19, he attempted to shoot dead the then-leader of the Australian Labor Party Arthur Calwell with a sawn-off .22 rifle. At the time of the trial he was diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic and condemned to life imprisonment, a sentence that was commuted to ten years of treatment that gave him and insiders knowledge of psychiatric institutions. Published after a time when asylum narratives were starting to make their mark in Australian fiction with novels such as David Ireland's The Flesheaters (1972) and Walter Adamson's The Institution (1976), The Treatment (1980) and its sequel The Cure (1983) chronicle Len Tarbutt's institutionalisation - a nineteen-year-old youngster confined in the maximum-security cell of a mental hospital to serve a life sentence. On another level, these two second-person semi-fictions can also be interpreted as a national allegory of Australian penal settlement, which explicates the ruler-ruled relationship through the establishment of a panoptic repressive system.' (Author's introduction)
Last amended 1 Sep 2003 15:15:25
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