“Shades of the prison house”: Reading Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Peter Carey’s Amnesia

Abstract

Australian writers from Marcus Clarke to the present day have used convictism to explore the way in which settler Australians have viewed their past and its influence on contemporary society. Convict fictions have been central to creating and reinforcing these Australians’ sense of their identity and history, and the form of the convict novel has been resistant to attempts to rewrite the traditional narrative of the past. This article argues that the underlying tropes and patterns of the convict novel have also shaped the ways in which other historical fictions have represented the past. It looks in detail at two recent fictions which use the conventions of the convict novel to examine more recent periods of Australian history and suggests that, like the traditional convict novel, their attempts to rewrite the settler narrative have been undermined by a nostalgia for the past which that narrative depicts.

Keywords:

• Peter Carey
• Richard Flanagan
• Marcus Clarke
• convict fiction
• nostalgia
• historical fiction