Blurring the Lines between Reality and Fiction: Peter Carey’s Engagement with Australian History and Identity

• Thesis title in Czech: Nejasná hranice mezi skutečností a fikcí: australská historie a identita v pojetí Petera Careyho
• Thesis title in English: Blurring the Lines between Reality and Fiction: Peter Carey’s Engagement with Australian History and Identity
• Key words: australská literatura|Peter Carey|historie|historiografická metafikce|postkolonialismus|postmodernismus
• English key words: Australian literature|Peter Carey|history|historiographic metafiction|postcolonialism|postmodernism
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2015/2016
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: PhDr. Soňa Nováková, CSc.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 22.09.2016
• Date of assignment: 26.09.2016
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 29.09.2016
• Date and time of defence: 14.06.2018 00:00
• Date of electronic submission: 17.05.2018
• Date of proceeded defence: 14.06.2018
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: Mgr. Klára Kolinská, Dr., Ph.D.

Guidelines

The aim of this thesis is to explore the works of the contemporary Australian novelist Peter Carey, focusing primarily on the following novels: Illywhacker (1985), Oscar and Lucinda (1988), True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), and My Life as a Fake (2003), while also taking into account his non-fiction work 30 Days in Sydney (2001).
Peter Carey is one of the many Australian writers who have in the recent decades turned to examining history in their fiction. For Australia as a former colony of the British Empire as well as the colonizer of the Aboriginal people, history and its looming presence in the present has always been a sensitive issue, which breeds insecurities about the national identity and the still persistent cultural cringe. Rewriting established histories is a good way of “writing back to the Empire”, Salmon Rushdie’s phrase used by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin to signify the self-assertion of the former colonised against the former coloniser. Peter Carey and other Australian historical novelists do just that.
Carey’s work, however, apart from being post-colonial is also very post-modern, often employing a narrative technique that Linda Hutcheon calls “postmodern historiographic metafiction”, which is very self-reflexive and playful, yet claims historical authenticity. Carey questions the notion of history itself when in his novels he plays with the perception of history as fiction, calls into question the trustworthiness of historical sources which he utilizes and refashions, and constantly blurs the line between reality and fantasy, alluding to the crucial role of the writers of history. As the notion of terra nullius – the founding myth of the former penal colony – shows, history is often based on lies, and it cannot be entirely objective as it is always written by a person whose point of view is inevitably reflected in it. History is also constantly being rewritten, reshaped, and reimagined, as new evidence or new interpretations arise, or even as it passes from one generation to the next, and the perspectives change. Carey’s novels constantly challenge history as well as reality through the use of unreliable narrators, metafiction, fraudulent characters, deliberate manipulation of historical sources, the fantastical, and through trying to pass the novels for historical documents, while at the same time acknowledging their inauthenticity.
This thesis will examine Carey’s version of Australian history through close readings of the aforementioned works, which together cover the span of Australian history from pre-Federation times until late 20^th century. The first part of the thesis will aim to devise a theoretical framework through which to view Carey’s work by combining post-colonialism, which provides the larger context for his works, post-modernism, which facilitates the subversive narrative techniques Carey uses in his post-colonial narratives, and transnationalism, which is reflected in the varied cultural capital Carey, who has lived in New York for many years, draws on. It will rely mainly on the work of Bill Ashcroft and Elleke Boehmer for post-colonialism, Linda Hutcheon for post-modernism, and Pascale Casanova and Graham Huggan for transnationalism. The theory will thereafter be applied to the novels, focusing primarily on the role of lies in history and as well as within Carey’s narrative, on history’s influence on the present, and on Carey’s notion of national identity as represented by the main male and female characters who can be perceived as the national types. Through careful examination of the texts this thesis will come to a greater understanding of Carey’s version of Australian history and by extension of the issues in contemporary Australian literature and culture.

References

Bibliography
Primary Sources:
Carey, Peter. My Life as a Fake. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2003.
— True History of the Kelly Gang. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2002.
— 30 Days in Sydney. London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2008.
— Oscar and Lucinda. London: Faber and Faber, 1988.
— Illywhacker. London: Faber and Faber, 1985.

Secondary Sources:
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006.
Ashcroft, Bill. Post-colonial Studies: the Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 2000.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.
Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Carey, Peter. “The Art of Fiction No. 188”. Interview with Radhika Jones. The Paris Review No. 177 (Summer 2006). 3 July 2016 .
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Eggert, Paul. “The Bushranger´s Voice: Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) and Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter (1879)”. College Literature 34.3 (Summer 2007), 120-139.
Gaile, Andreas, ed. Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004.
Gaile, Andreas. Rewriting History: Carey’s Fictional Biography of Australia. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010.
Huggan, Graham. Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1995.
Kušnír, Jaroslav. “Identity, Post-Colonialism and Writing in Peter Carey´s Novel My Life as a Fake (2003)”. Eger Journal of English Studies VII (2007), 67-76.
Lucian. True Story. 15 March 2014 .
Twain, Mark. Following the Equator: A Journey around the World. Chapter 16. Project Gutenberg, 2006. Project Gutenberg Ebook. 18 August 2006. 20 Jan 2015.
Webby, Elizabeth, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
White, Richard. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688-1980. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1992.
Woodcock, Bruce. Contemporary World Writers: Peter Carey. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.