Peter Carey
Peter Carey
BRUCE WOODCOCK
Series: Contemporary World Writers
Copyright Date: 2003
Published by: Manchester University Press
Pages: 240
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt155jbfz
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Book Info
Peter Carey
Book Description:

This is a revised and expanded edition of Woodcock's accessible study, now including detailed readings of Carey's latest novels, 'Jack Maggs' and 'True History of the Kelly Gang'.

eISBN: 978-1-84779-430-7
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-v)
  3. Acknowledgements
    Acknowledgements (pp. vi-vi)
  4. Series editor’s foreword
    Series editor’s foreword (pp. vii-vii)

    Contemporary World Writersis an innovative new series of authoritative introductions to a range of culturally diverse contemporary writers from outside Britain and the United States or from ʹminorityʹ backgrounds within Britain or the United States. In addition to providing comprehensive general introductions, books in the series also argue stimulating original theses, often but not always related to contemporary debates in post-colonial studies.

    The series locates individual writers within their specific cultural contexts, while recognising that such contexts are themselves invariably a complex mixture of hybridised influences. It aims to counter tendencies to appropriate the writers discussed into the cannon...

  5. Chronology
    Chronology (pp. viii-x)
  6. 1 Contexts and intertexts
    1 Contexts and intertexts (pp. 1-15)

    IN Peter Careyʹs world, we are all creatures of the shadow lands. His fictions explore the experiences lurking in the cracks of normality, and are inhabited by hybrid characters living in inbetween spaces or on the margins. His writing is strange and disturbing. It disrupts the readerʹs perceptions in ways which are simultaneously conceptual and imaginative: our ideas and views of the world are stretched and challenged. The effect is often that the supposed separations between normal and abnormal, the ordinary and the bizarre, the daydream and the nightmare, are undermined. This subversive and transgressive quality is similar to surrealism,...

  7. 2 The stories
    2 The stories (pp. 16-37)

    CHARACTERISING Careyʹs stories takes us to the heart of his fictional practice. Most adopt a mixture of narrative modes, a central feature of his writing. They contain elements of science fiction, fantasy, fable and satire. Like much science fiction, many are explorations of ideas and possibilities, experiments in subversive thinking or ʹcognitive estrangementʹ.¹ Carey has described them as ʹa collection of ʺwhat ifʺ storiesʹ,² which start with an idea and develop characters ʹto act out some peculiar whim … to illustrate some sort of a point or push some tendency in society to its ridiculous degreeʹ.³ They are akin to...

  8. 3 Bliss (1981)
    3 Bliss (1981) (pp. 38-52)

    CAREYʹs first published novel capitalised on the success of his stories to exhilarating effect. Its anarchic narratology puzzled many reviewers,¹ but as Careyʹs œuvre grows, its mix of satiric realism, fable, fantasy and manic cartoon quality seem entirely characteristic. AfterWar Crimeswas awarded the New South Wales Premier Award in 1980,Blissreceived the same prize in 1982, as well as the Miles Franklin and the National Book Council awards. It became a well-received film in 1985, the year ofMad Max III, winning best picture, director and screenplay awards from the Australian Film Institute, as well as being...

  9. 4 Illywhacker (1985)
    4 Illywhacker (1985) (pp. 53-71)

    WITHIllywhacker, Careyʹs success achieved international dimensions. It was published first in the UK and USA, something of an irony for a novel exposing cultural imperialism.¹ The University of Queensland Press acquired the Australian rights and implemented a wide advertising campaign using international responses as promotion. The effect was to increase Careyʹs profile and sales dramatically in Australia and abroad.² The novel won three of the major Australian literary prizes and was shortlisted for the British Booker Prize.

    Illywhackerexamines twentieth-century Australian history with the savage humour and fantasy of the earlier fiction now placed within an epic framework. The...

  10. 5 Oscar and Lucinda (1988)
    5 Oscar and Lucinda (1988) (pp. 72-88)

    AT first sight a book beginning with the life of a boy brought up among the Plymouth Brethren in the middle of the nineteenth century might sound unpromising as a good read. Yet that book has proved to be Careyʹs most popular novel so far. Published first in Australia, perhaps to remedy the charge of cultural imperialism suffered byIllywhacker,¹ it won its author the prestigious Booker Prize in 1988, along with three belated Australian prizes the following year, and has been made into a successful film by Gillian Armstrong, Australian director ofMy Brilliant CareerandLittle Women.

    What...

  11. 6 The Tax Inspector (1991)
    6 The Tax Inspector (1991) (pp. 89-107)

    THE Tax Inspectoris Careyʹs most savage novel to date, and it captures Marxʹs vision of the ravening effects of capital. The book takes us full circle back to the power-crazed psychopathic business world of ʹWar Crimesʹ, but with the unsettling awareness that this is no longer fantasy. Carey paints a vitriolic portrait of social decay and disintegration, the collapse of communal ethics and the sheer rapacity of the business world consequent upon the global market economy of the late 1980s. As inBliss, he links together two areas of urgent concern, rampant capitalism and child sexual abuse. Abuse in...

  12. 7 The Unusal Life of Tristan Smith (1994) and The Big Bazoohley (1995)
    7 The Unusal Life of Tristan Smith (1994) and The Big Bazoohley (1995) (pp. 108-118)

    THE Unusual Life of Tristan Smithis undoubtedly the strangest of Careyʹs novels. It marks a return to the overt alternative world-building found in the early stories with their fantastic and fable-like scenarios, and implicit in works likeOscar and Lucinda. It might be characterised as a cross between the dystopian science fiction of novels likeThe Left Hand of DarknessorThe Dispossessedby Ursula Le Guin, for whose work Carey has expressed his admiration,¹ and the carnivalesque qualities of Robertson DaviesʹsThe Deptford TrilogyorNights at the Circusby Angela Carter, who expressed her admiration for Careyʹs...

  13. 8 Jack Maggs (1997)
    8 Jack Maggs (1997) (pp. 119-137)

    JACK Maggsbegins in the best traditions of Victorian melodrama:

    It was a Saturday night when the man with the red waistcoat arrived in London. It was, to be precise, six of the clock on the fifteenth of April in the year of 1837 that those hooded eyes looked out the window of the Dover coach and beheld, in the bright aura of gas light, a golden bull and an overgrown mouth opening to devour him – the sign of his inn, the Golden Ox. (1)

    The immediate attention to details – ʹthe red waistcoatʹ, ʹto be preciseʹ – is...

  14. 9 True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)
    9 True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) (pp. 138-157)

    INJack Maggs, an orphan becomes a criminal; inTrue History of the Kelly Gang, Careyʹs second Booker Prize winning novel, Ned loses his father and is abandoned by his mother to become a highwayman and killer. Significant sections ofJack Maggsare given over to Maggsʹs justification of himself to his adopted son, while the majority ofTrue Historyis Nedʹs letter of self-explanation to his daughter whom he has never seen. Both these historical novels explore what Carey has called the ‘patterns […] of abandonment, orphansʹ in his work.¹ They retell the stories of marginalised characters, outsiders and...

  15. 10 Critical overview and conclusion
    10 Critical overview and conclusion (pp. 158-171)

    THIS book has given a reading of Peter Careyʹs work stressing the different aspects in the political concerns of his fiction, an approach which has so far not had widespread treatment by other critics, and indicating his critiques of multinational capitalism, the legacies of colonial history, exploitative power relationships, and sexual roles as of particular interest. While doing so, it has picked up on the main trends in Carey criticism, especially views of Carey as a fabulist or surrealist, as a post-modernist and as a post-colonial writer, to present him as a hybrid who exploits the literary, formal and thematic...

  16. Notes
    Notes (pp. 172-199)
  17. Bibliography
    Bibliography (pp. 200-218)
  18. Index
    Index (pp. 219-223)
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