From Solidity To Fluidity

Born into an Irish Catholic family in Sydney, Thomas Keneally published his first novel, The Place at Whitton, in 1964, four years after he abandoned his study for priesthood. The success of that gothic horror set in a seminary triggered a successful writing career of over forty years, in which he produced 25 novels, while making frequent and fruitful incursions into the world of nonfiction.Today Keneally is Australia's best-known writer and Australia's living treasure. Although Spielberg's Schindler's List became a media event and a household word in the 1990s, it hardly qualified Keneally as an overnight sensation. By that time, Keneally was already a widely acclaimed writer in Britain and America, truly "international", as the Australians would like to put it, since he had publishers on both sides of the Atlantic and had won the 1982 Booker Prize.Despite discernible changes in his earlier and later works, it's almost impossible, even as a critical expediency, to divide Keneally's writing career into clearly marked stages. Writing on both "Australian" and "international" themes, and constantly shifting between past and present, Keneally failed to follow the normal path of arrival, growth and maturity, much to the disappointment of some Australian critics, who eagerly delighted in anticipating the destination of his literary journey.Given that Keneally criticism, as is shown in the first chapter, leaves much to be desired, the primary task of the dissertation is to discuss the theme of identity in Keneally's novels, on the understanding that his fictions, protean though they are in setting and subject matter, are not unrelated. My argument is that Keneally's works, however diverse and different they may be, constitute a thematically integral whole. Both Keneally's fiction and Australian critical reception of Keneally represent, each in its different way, the Australian national identity, a standing issue that has been troubling the Australian imagination for centuries and has, since the latter half of the last century, gained more currency as well as controversy due to the impact of globalization.