Dreaming of Others: Carpentaria and its Critics

Main Article Content

Alison Ravenscroft

Abstract

White critical efforts to make meaning of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria have sought to anchor it to the big names among white Australian novelists. Such moves presume to make Wright indebted to these literary ‘masters’, assessing the significance of her text by its proximity to theirs. This article explores how in these critics’ eyes white creativity appears as if it were the original creativity and argues that such moves are a way of refuses the text’s unfamiliarity and strangeness to a white reader.

Article Details

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Articles (Peer Reviewed)
Author Biography

Alison Ravenscroft, La Trobe University

 Alison Ravenscroft teaches in the English Program at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Her book The Postcolonial Eye will be published in 2011.