Writing Back To The Empire

With the rise of a number of Australian writers in the international literary arena and the recognization of their literary achievements ever since 1970s, Australia literature has entered an age of prosperity and drastic change. The winning of Nobel Prize by Patrick White and the twice-winning Booker Prize by Peter Carey strengthened the presence of Australian literature in the world. However, like many a colonial country, Australia experienced and tolerated the loss of cultural identity and was, oftentimes, viewed as the Other, degenerating into the status of being 'Gazed' and 'Marginalized'. Even in the current world of multiculturalism, Australia still suffers from cultural cringe, exploited and oppressed by the big cultural powers. Faced with such a harsh setting, many Australian writers with national awareness take the construction of independent cultural identity as their historical missions, and endeavor to change the status quo, hoping to secure a due place in the international community.Among these cultural identity builders, Peter Carey is one of the most successful and ultimately nostalgic writers, whose fictional text has a prominent feature of historicity. Five out of his eight novels explore the issue of colonial history or the new colonial hegemonism, spanning from national lies of historical narratives in Illywhacker to the clash between British Christianity and Aboriginal culture in Oscar and Lucinda, from the rewriting of the imperial canon in Jack Maggs to the revision of national mythology in True History of the Kelly Gang, from the denouncement of cultural hegemony in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith to the disillusionment of American dreams in Bliss. The current dissertation is an attempt to uncover the historical imprisonments and contemporary restraints that Australia is faced with in constructing cultural identity. The paper argues that, though rich and profound in motifs, diverse and eclectic in techniques, Peter Carey's fiction is characterized with writing back to the Empire, a process of decolonizing imperial texts which were ridden with distortions and prejudices through interrogation, contestation and revision. The purpose of his writing back to the Empire, either British or American, is to subvert the Empire and reconstructthe independent cultural identity of Australia. This textual revolution is, in nature, a struggle for power of discourse.The dissertation consists of five chapters. Chapter One is an introduction, which traces the writing career of Peter Carey and surveys literary criticism on his works. Peter Carey's writing career can be, in general, divided into two periods marked by his twice-winning Booker Prize in 1988 and 2001 respectively. In the first period from 1970 to 1988, he grows from a successful short-story writer to an internationally recognized novelist by virtue of such multi-prize winning novels as Bliss, Illywhacker, and Oscar and Lucinda; literary criticism and comments on his fiction usually concentrate on his avant- garde innovation and new experimental style that the preceding Australian writers rarely explore. But after this sustained and glittering ascent, Carey's fortunes experienced something of a down turn, and this situation did not fundamentally change until the appearance of Jack Maggs, which signals the coming of his second moment. By the time when True History of the Kelly Gang was awarded Booker Prize, Peter Carey has become one of the most distinguished novelists in the English-speaking world. Most of his fictional texts are intricately woven into colonial history, reflecting the past from the present perspective. There have been substantial arguments about textuality and historicity among literary critics, the latest findings of which, in particular, neohistoricism, post-colonialism, and postmodernism, might provide an insight into Peter Carey's fiction.Chapter Two, Writing Back to the Empire, is concerned with motifs of Peter Carey's novels. Peter Carey has, from different dimensions, explored the national mentality related to Australian mytholo...