Reckoning with the Past

Family Historiographies in Postcolonial Australian Literature

Ashley Barnwell, Joseph Cummins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351613354
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This is the first book to examine how Australian fiction writers draw on family histories to reckon with the nation's colonial past. Located at the intersection of literature, history, and sociology, it explores the relationships between family storytelling, memory, and postcolonial identity. With attention to the political potential of family histories, Reckoning with the Past argues that authors' often autobiographical works enable us to uncover, confront, and revise national mythologies. An important contribution to the emerging global conversation about multidirectional memory and the need to attend to the effects of colonisation, this book will appeal to an interdisciplinary field of scholarly readers.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reckoning with the past: family, memory, nation
• 1. Dredging up family secrets: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River and Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide
• 2. Confronting the ‘double fold of silence’: Kim Scott and Hazel Brown’s Kayang & Me and Sally Morgan’s My Place
• 3. Belonging across generations: Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage and Shanghai Nights and Alex Miller’s The Ancestor Game
• 4. Returning to homelands: Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe and Christopher Koch’s The Many-Coloured Land: A Return to Ireland
• 5. Listening to the ghosts of the past: Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth
• Conclusion
• References
• Index