AustLit

'This paper examines ‘archival poetics’ in contemporary history and fiction writing, with a focus on Mark McKenna’s An eye for eternity: The life of Manning Clark, Megan Marshall’s Margaret Fuller: A new American life and Kim Scott’s Benang, from the heart. It investigates the ways in which the authors of these works move away from the forensic imaginary embodied in a certain kind of historiography’s approach to the archive, to create a more personal, powerful and situated kind of history writing. It argues that these works suggest that history is less about the sublime chaos of the past – which cannot be narrated without duplicity, damage or violence – than how we engage the past, which is, on reflection, an entirely different thing.' (Publication summary)