Other developments

Writing and identity

A complicated, multi-faceted relationship to Australia is displayed in much Australian writing, often through writing about landscape. Kenneth Cook 's Wake in Fright (1961) portrayed the outback as a nightmare with a blazing sun, from which there is no escape. Colin Thiele 's novels reflected the life and times of rural and regional Australians in the 20th century, showing aspects of Australian life unknown to many city dwellers.

What it means to be Australian is another issue that Australian literature explores. The central character in Patrick White 's The Twyborn Affair tries to conform to expectations of pre-WWII Australian masculinity but cannot, and instead, post-war, tries out another identity - and gender - overseas. Peter Carey has toyed with the idea of a national Australian identity as a series of 'beautiful lies', and this is a recurrent theme in his novels. Andrew McGahan 's Praise (1992) and Christos Tsiolkas 's Loaded (1995) introduced a 'gritty realism' take on questions of Australian identity in the 1990s, though an important precursor to such work was Helen Garner 's Monkey Grip (1977).

Australian literature has had several scandals surrounding the identity of writers. In the 1990s, Helen Darville used the pen-name “Helen Demidenko” and won major literary prizes for her Hand that Signed the Paper before being discovered, sparking a controversy over the content of her novel, a fictionalised and highly tendentious account of the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine. Mudrooroo - previously known as Colin Johnson - was acclaimed as an Aboriginal writer until his Aboriginality came under question (his mother was Irish/English and his father was Irish/African-American, however he has strong connections with Aboriginal tribes); he now avoids adopting a specific ethnic identity and his works deconstruct such notions.

Other writers have felt that, whatever Australia was, it needed to be escaped. Clive James, Robert Hughes, Barry Humphries and Germaine Greer are all Australian writers who left Australia in the 1960s for England and America. Greer, author of The Female Eunuch, has spent much of her career in England and has been a fierce critic of her native land, though she does not return there often.

Australian literature can be thought of as coming of age in 1973 when Patrick White became the first (and so far only) Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Other notable writers to have emerged since the 1970s include Peter Carey, Kate Grenville, David Malouf and Tim Winton.

James Clavell in The Asian Saga discusses an important feature of Australian literature: its portrayal of far eastern culture, from the admittedly even further east, but nevertheless western cultural viewpoint, as Nevil Shute did. Clavell was also a successful screenwriter and along with such writers as Thomas Keneally, who won the Booker Prize for Schindler's Ark (the book Schindler's List is based on), has expanded the topics of Australian literature far beyond that one country. Other novelists to use international themes are Gerald Murnane and Brenda Walker.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11