School of Culture and Communication - Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

http://hdl.handle.net/11343/396

Filters

2011 2
1 1
Reset filters

Settings
Statistics
Citations
End date: 2011 × Start date: 2011 × Subject: Australian literature ×

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Ghosts of Ned Kelly: Peter Carey's True History and the myths that haunt us
    Pericic, Marija ( 2011)
    Ned Kelly has been an emblem of Australian national identity for over 130 years. This thesis examines Peter Carey’s reimagination of the Kelly myth in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). It considers our continued investment in Ned Kelly and what our interpretations of him reveal about Australian identity. The paper explores how Carey’s departure from the traditional Kelly reveals the underlying anxieties about Australianness and masculinity that existed at the time of the novel’s publication, a time during which Australia was reassessing its colonial history. The first chapter of the paper examines True History’s complication of cultural memory. It argues that by problematising Kelly’s Irish cultural memory, our own cultural memory of Kelly is similarly challenged. The second chapter examines Carey’s construction of Kelly’s Irishness more deeply. It argues that Carey’s Kelly is not the emblem of politicised Irishness based on resistance to imperial Britain common to Kelly narratives. Instead, he is less politically aware and also claims a transnational identity. The third chapter explores how Carey’s Kelly diverges from key aspects of the Australian heroic ideal he is used to represent: hetero-masculinity, mateship and heroic failure. Carey’s most striking divergence comes from his unsettling of gender and sexual codes. The paper argues that Australians continue to invest in Kelly because he provides an opportunity to stabilise an identity threatened by changing perspectives on history; in Kelly, we see the changing shape of our ideal selves.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    The purpose of futility: leadership in Australian Great War narratives
    Rhoden, Clare Elizabeth ( 2011)
    The Purpose of Futility identifies and explores unique aspects of the Australian literary commemoration of the Great War. In particular, this thesis investigates the representation of leadership in Australian Great War prose narratives, showing how Australian leaders are depicted as purposeful through three major strategies: the Australian leaders’ investment of impossible or suicidal tasks with meaning; the Australian soldiers’ continued self-conception as a volunteer, egalitarian citizen army; and the Australian attitude to the war as work rather than a crusade. The thesis is presented in two parts, reflecting the dual research methodology of theoretical investigation and creative response. The theoretical component explores literary and historical sources as well as theoretical frameworks of leadership. In this section, Australian Great War narratives are considered against the critically-acclaimed benchmark of the canonical Great War novels such as Robert Graves’ Goodbye To All That (1929) and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), and a number of important differences are delineated and discussed. The central pivot of this section is the discussion of leadership tropes, which demonstrate how Australian narratives encompass purposeful leaders in the context of an horrific and costly war. The creative component consists of selected sections from a novel which interrogates leadership’s complexities as they are experienced through the life story of an AIF volunteer who returns from the war to face a different life, armed with new perspectives and understandings.