Sex Encounters of the Strange Kind – Forms of Postcolonial Discourse in Three Australian Novels
The paper focuses on scenes from three Australian novels, Thomas Keneally’s Bring Larks and Heroes (1967), Phillip McLaren’s Sweet Water Stolen Land (1993), and Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (2001). Through an analysis of the representation of sexual intercourse by the three novelists, the...
Guardado en:
| Publicado en: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ces, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Lenguaje: | Anglais |
| Publicado: |
Commonwealth Essays and Studies
2022
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| Acceso en línea: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumario: | The paper focuses on scenes from three Australian novels, Thomas Keneally’s Bring Larks and Heroes (1967), Phillip McLaren’s Sweet Water Stolen Land (1993), and Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (2001). Through an analysis of the representation of sexual intercourse by the three novelists, the paper highlights the sense of strangeness associated with the postcolonial, born out of the colonists’ feeling that they do not truly belong in their adopted land and must force themselves upon it. Sex, which can be an expression of love, here degenerates into lust, violence or parody. It becomes an expression of the unnerving alienation which overcomes Europeans in a postcolonial context. Sex here as a struggle for domination is a paradigm of the perverted human relations which are inherent in the postcolonial condition. In his own fashion, and through a variety of narrative modes, each of the three (male) novelists illustrates the unbearable strangeness of being in an alien land. |
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