Adventure was one of the grand narratives of colonisation, which saw European powers sending agents off to new and distant worlds. But their journeys didn't always go in a straight line. Some adventurers to Australia were shipwrecked, lost or marooned. Others tried to escape the colony as soon as they arrived: convicts made their way to Timor, China and South America, while bushrangers operated closer to home, antagonising colonial authorities. Colonial adventures could be itinerant and meandering, often turning into misadventures. But when adventurers directly served the interests of colonisation, they could be violent, ruthless and brutally racist, in a global context of competing interests and the rapacious accumulation of wealth and property. Many adventurers went wherever ambition took them, killing and dispossessing Indigenous peoples and claiming ownership of the land. By examining colonial adventure narratives in all their rawness and complexity, this book asks us to reflect on the continuing legacies of colonialism in Australia today.
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Produkt-Hinweis
Broschur/Paperback
Klebebindung
Maße
Höhe: 229 mm
Breite: 152 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-522-87954-4 (9780522879544)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Ken Gelder is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Melbourne. His books include Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (1998, with Jane M Jacobs), Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (2004), Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice (2007), After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989-2007 (2009, with Paul Salzman) and, with Rachael Weaver, Colonial Australian Fiction (2017) and The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt (2020).
Rachael Weaver is an ARC Future Fellow in English at the University of Tasmania. She is the author of The Criminal of the Century (2006) and, with Ken Gelder, The Colonial Journals, and the emergence of Australian literary culture (2014), Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy (2017), and The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt (2020).
