On The Carnival Spirit In Peter Carey’s True History Of The Kelly Gang

Peter Carey, a leading figure in contemporary Australian literary arena, has become one of the few distinctive and thoughtful Australian writers after Patrick White who got the Nobel Prize for literature. So far, Carey has published 13 novels, a number of collections of short stories and children’s literature. Relying on his own excellent creative talents, Carey has been one of the three writers who won Booker Prize twice in the world.True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) is Carey’s seventh novel which is the combination of history and fiction and reshapes the image of Ned Kelly who is the biggest rebel in Australian history. It is a new interpretation about Australian national myth. This novel brought Carey great honor including winning the Booker Prize and the Commonwealth writers Prize, but it also provoked lots of criticism as well. The focus of the debate was all about how to define the rebel Ned Kelly’s cultural identity, however, in terms of its nature, it is a debate about how to interpret Australian colonial history and how to deal with national "historical memory".Most of the previous academic study on this novel chose to interpret it from the angles of post-colonialism, new historicism, psychoanalysis and so on while this thesis, based on Bakhtm’s carnival theory,tries to interpret Carey’s carnivalized creation and the carnival spirit reflected in the work. Combining the history and his imagination, Carey subverts the official definition that Kelly is a rustler and vicious killer and rebuilds him as a national hero who rebels against the authority and fights for freedom. What’s more, the novel is full of grotesque description, carnival language, laughter and irony. This kind of creation style shows that in the process of subverting and constructing the text of empire, Carey also makes his efforts to reconstruct Australian national identity.The thesis consists of five parts. Chapter one gives a brief introduction of the author Peter Carey and his novel True History of the Kelly Gang and has a overview of the academic study on this work abroad and at home. Besides, it briefly introduces the thesis’s originality, writing framework and Bakhtin’s carnival theory. As the main parts of this thesis, Chapter two, Chapter three and Chapter four interpret the carnival color and spirit reflected in the novel based on Bakhtin’s carnival theory from three aspects of plot structure, narrative characteristics and writing style. It further explores the deep connotation of Carey’s carnival creation and find out Carey’s longing for reshaping national myth and constructing the unique Australian national and cultural identity. The last part is a conclusion of the whole thesis. It points out that from the angle of Bakhtin’s carnival poetics and through close reading, the author of this thesis finds that Carey’s rewriting of Ned Kelly’s myth has something in common with certain features of carnival writing. Besides, the paper as well indicates the underlying carnival spirits of subversion and renewal, freedom and equality, and pursuit for a ideal life, which implies Carey’s intention to appeal for Australians to realize their cultural and ideological independence and get rid of the control of imperialism.