Marcus Clarke and the Melville Revival
2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 63; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/notesj/gjw052
ISSN1471-6941
Autores Tópico(s)Australian History and Society
ResumoBORN in London in 1846, the year Herman Melville published his first book, Marcus Clarke lost his mother to tuberculosis and his father to the insane asylum. In 1863 he was sent to Australia, where two uncles lived. Initially, Clarke worked at a Melbourne bank, but the literary life appealed to him more. He began writing for The Argus and its weekly magazine, The Australasian . In 1868, he helped found the Yorick Club, a gathering of bohemian writers and editors. An 1870 trip to Tasmania encouraged his interest in Australia’s convict days and led to Clarke’s masterpiece, His Natural Life , a novel depicting the horrors of the convict system, which began serial publication in The Australasian in 1870. Clarke continued to publish a variety of other periodical literature. ‘Noah’s Ark’, an 1872 article in The Australasian , tells the story of a group of friends who gather at the Melbourne home of a man named Noah Sweetwinter. Structured as a dialogue, ‘Noah’s Ark’ might seem to record the conversations of Clarke’s bohemian friends, but the individual characters are personal projections, not fictional versions of real people. 1 As the group’s sporting enthusiast relates some recent news from the boxing ring, he discusses the stature of one imposing pugilist and compares him with a sperm whale breaching in the sunlight.
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