Blurring the Lines between Reality and Fiction: Peter Carey's Engagement with Australian History and Identity

This thesis is concerned with the analysis of Peter Carey's portrayal of Australian history in his novels Illywhacker (1985), Oscar and Lucinda (1988), True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), and My Life as a Fake (2003), while also taking into consideration the travel memoir 30 Days in Sydney (2001). Carey approaches Australia's past critically and offers a playful rewriting of the "official accounts", striving to give voice to the marginalised, thus offering alternative versions not only of Australian history, the resulting national identity. This thesis first locates Carey within the historical novel tradition, and considers his rewritings from the perspective of postcolonialism, postmodernism and transnationalism. From the point of view of postcolonialism, Carey's novels serve as a tool of asserting the former colony's independence from the power of the metropolitan Centre over discourse. Postmodernism and its relativisation of established concepts and the blurring of boundaries provide Carey with narrative strategies such as unreliable narrators, historiographic metafiction, and multiple perspectives, which are examined in terms of how Carey employs them to call attention to the unreliability of historical sources, and by extension meaning and reality itself, to inspire a critical approach to..