AustLit

'In The Master of Petersburg, J. M. Coetzee gives pride of place to a tutelary figure of the Western novel, Fyodor Dostoevsky, opening up a dialogue with the latter’s life and work. If many aspects of Dostoevsky’s life are recognizable, Coetzee deliberately departs from biographical fact in important regards. He also engages with well-known Dostoevskian narratives, in particular The Possessed, a censored section of which is reworked in his own novel. This article examines how The Master of Petersburg can be read not only as a reflection on biological and literary filiation, but also as a critique of censorship and as a meditation on writing conceived as a liminal space that tends to erode the boundary line between the private and the public. Intimate though it may be, the act of writing is indeed likely to involve a betrayal of privacy — a necessary perversion of auto/biography seeking to achieve superior forms of truth through imaginative literature. This essay also argues that the conception of history Coetzee deploys may be influenced by his status as a postcolonial writer. Just as The Possessed was intended as an attack on those aiming for the radical destruction of old world orders and other historical legacies, so The Master of Petersburg can be approached as Coetzee’s own manifesto against nihilism and as a plea for a view of history as a transformative process — one that transcends binary oppositions in order to produce integrative discourses and epistemologies, instead of positing fathers against sons as foes in endless generational and colonial conflicts.' (Publication abstract)

'In 1941 Ernestine Hill published My Love Must Wait, a biographical novel based on the life of navigator Matthew Flinders. In the same year, Eleanor Dark published The Timeless Land, imagining the arrival of European settlers in the Sydney region from the perspectives of multiple historical figures. In this article we examine how each author represents the important figure of Bennelong, a man of the Wangal people who was kidnapped by Governor Phillip and who later travelled to England with him. While both works can be criticized as essentialist, paternalist or racist, there are significant differences in the ways each author portrays him. We argue that Dark’s decision to narrate some of her novel from the point of view of Bennelong and other Indigenous people enabled different understandings of Australian history for both historians and fiction writers. Dark’s “imaginative leap”, as critic Tom Griffiths has termed it, catalysed a new way of thinking about the 1788 invasion and early decades of the colonization of Australia. The unfinished cultural work undertaken by these novels continues today, as demonstrated by subsequent Australian novels which revisit encounters between Indigenous inhabitants and European colonists, including Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008), and Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party (2011). Like Dark, these authors situate parts of their novels within the consciousness of Indigenous figures from the historical record. We analyse the diverse challenges and possibilities presented by these literary heirs of Eleanor Dark.' (Publication abstract)