Unnatural Lives: Studies in Australian Fiction about the Convicts, from James Tucker to Patrick White by Laurie Hergenhan (Secondhand Book)

SECONDHAND BOOK

Australian fiction writers have offered some of the most vivid pictures of convict life, its horrors and its hopelessness. They have also used episodes of imprisonment and torture to explore the Australian past and to understand both the perpetrators and victims of such violence.

Unnatural Lives is the first published study of the convict theme in fiction. In it, Laurie Hergenhan explores such well-known novels as Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life, Thomas Keneally’s Bring Larks and Heroes, Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves and others that reveal the variety of convict fiction. Ralph Rashleigh (a novel written by a convict), Eleanor Dark’s A Timeless Land and A Fringe of Leaves combine the dispossession of the Aborigines with the cruelties of the convict system. William Heans deals with a gentleman convict, Landtakers draws parallels with the violence of pioneering the land.

Drawing on almost two hundred years of Australian literary history, this pioneering study reveals common threads running through convict fiction and relates it to the grim historical realities on which it is based. Laurie Hergenhan argues that convict fiction questions the present out of which it is written as well as the past. The selected works provide a cross-section of changing attitudes to both the convicts and to such continuing issues as national independence, freedom and social protest.

Unnatural Lives is of vital interest not only to the literary critic but also to the local historian and anyone else intrigued by the human issues raised by such a brutal and degrading system.

Specifications:

Condition: Good – some marks to dustjacket

Publisher: University of Queensland Press

Year: 1983

Format: Hardback, with dustjacket

Pages: 210pp

ISBN: 070221972

$20.00

1 in stock