‘This sad pastiche’: Texts and Contexts in Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish
Gould’s Book of Fish, with its multi-layered structure, is made up of a plurality of texts – stories ascribed to protagonists as well as intertexts through which scores of other books are enfolded into Flanagan’s own. The novel is in large part a historical one, dealing as it does with the penal set...
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| Udgivet i: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ces, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprog: | Anglais |
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Commonwealth Essays and Studies
2024
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| Online adgang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | Gould’s Book of Fish, with its multi-layered structure, is made up of a plurality of texts – stories ascribed to protagonists as well as intertexts through which scores of other books are enfolded into Flanagan’s own. The novel is in large part a historical one, dealing as it does with the penal settlement at Sarah Island in early nineteenth-century Tasmania, and with other colonial ventures too. The historical contexts give it much of its resonance but they are in many ways a pretext to develop a conversation between the past and the present, and between history and fiction. Through the interplay between texts and contexts, Flanagan has produced an epic fable which in its circularity transcends the Tasmanian locale and develops into a meditation on the wonder of living and the power of love and the imagination to transform the world. |
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