The Bushranger's Voice: Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) and Ned Kelly's Jerilderie Letter (1879)
2007; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/lit.2007.0030
ISSN1542-4286
Autores Tópico(s)Australian History and Society
ResumoThere is an umbilical cord of outlaw folkloric tradition that joins Rolf Boldrewood's 1880s bushranger novel Robbery Under Arms and Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). Carey has done again what Boldrewood so innovatively achieved: the invention, or reinvention, of the bushranger's voice. But the more tantalising manifestation of the common outlaw tradition, for Carey, was the real-life bushranger Ned Kelly's Jerilderie Letter (1879). The relationship between the Letter and Carey's novel interrupts an easy postmodern take on his work: this interruption is the subject of the essay. It teases out the paradox of the novel's being simultaneously both postmodern-quotational and, in the old-fashioned sense, an act of imaginative engagement with a significant past, a historical tale in fact.
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