AustLit

Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang and Peter Corris's The Journal of Fletcher Christian are historical novels, which emerge from quite different Australian cultural fields (Literature and popular fiction), but reading them alongside each other reveals fundamental similarities in their politics of race, gender and sexuality. We argue that both novels use the symbolism of the male, colonizing body to grant legitimacy to their postcolonial settler audience. In both cases, this legitimacy takes the form of a fragment of 'true and secret' history which oppposes authorized accounts of famous historical lives and events (Australia's most famous bushranger, the British Empire's most famous mutineer). We focus, in particular, on the extent to which both novels imagine the voices of Kelly and Christian by exploiting the richly metaphorical relationship between the body as flesh and the body as text. [Authors' abstract, p. 189]

A revamped portrayal of a Dark India garnered an unparalleled visibility in 2008 with the award of the coveted Man Booker Prize for Fiction to Aravind Adiga's debut novel The White Tiger. This article examines Adiga's staging of a Dark India as a new-fangled object of exoticist discourses. It begins by considering The White Tiger as an ironic uncovering of the subsumption of a Dark India into the global literary marketplace at a time of a perceived shift in re-Orientalist representational practices and their western reception. Specifically, while taking the measure of the appraisal The White Tiger has received, this article questions the premises that underpin the most vehement critiques directed at the novel: on the one hand, that Adiga's work offers a purportedly long-awaited creative departure from Salmon Rushdie's; on the other hand, that the characterization strategies followed by the novelist result in what critics have perceived as class ventriloquism and, accordingly, a re-Orientalized title character equipped with an 'inauthentic' voice. [Authors' abstract, p. 275]

'This article argues that J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) may be read as a ghost story, in which Coetzee writes back to Daniel Defoe’s “A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs.Veal”.The ghostly character of Coetzee’s novel derivesfrom the silences and secrets pervading the narrator Susan’s story, among which Friday’s mute and enigmatic presence is the most overwhelming, and from the presence of strange creatures that seem to come from various Defoe’s literary works. Hence Susan begins to doubt her own ontological status and to consider herself, and also Friday and Foe, as ghosts, a notion which is explored in relation to Freud’s analysis of the uncanny and the double. Foe, thus, highlights an intimate relation between literature and secrecy, an idea that is developed in relation to the thinking of Jacques Derrida, J.Hillis Miller and Frank Kermode,thissecret and indecipherable dimension of the literary work demanding, in turn, a position of blindness and lack of authority from both writer and critic.' (Publication abstract)