School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    Re-landscaping the historical novel : imagining the colonial archives as postcolonial heteroglossic fiction
    JOHNSON, AMANDA ( 2009)
    This thesis comprises a critical dissertation (Part A) and an extract from my novel, Eugene's Falls (Part B). Eugene's Falls was published by Arcadia (Australian Scholarly Press) in 2007. Eugene's Falls is a Bildungsroman retracing the Australian journeys of colonial landscapist Eugene von Guerard. It deploys narrative techniques of historiographic metafiction, polyphony and parody to deconstruct the heroic colonial quest tale. The critical dissertation situates the novel against recent theories of intercultural subjectivity, postcolonialism, and the advent of the so-called `history wars'. This thesis argues that Bakhtin's theories of novelistic polyphony, theories of focalisation building on Gerard Genette's work, and postmodern narrative techniques have a renewed importance for postcolonial historical novels created in a context of the `history' and `culture wars'. These frameworks and techniques not only enable the writer to render ethical portrayals of Indigenous-speaking subjects; most importantly, they enable postcolonial novelists to expose the archive imaginatively. At the heart of the (Australian) section of the novel is the issue of imaginatively interrogating all forms of archival evidence—rethinking `what counts, what doesn't, where it is housed, who possesses it, and who lays claim to it as a political resource' (Burton 139). As Antoinette Burton suggests, `this is not theory, but the very power of historical explanation itself (139).