AustLit

'Bill Ashcroft has provided a new reading of Lilian's Story that emphasizes the resistant power of narrative itself, a reading that uses postcolonial theory to tease out the ways in which Lilian's feminist appropriation of power (most dramatically from her father Albion, as representative of patriarchal Darwinian and imperial discourse and practices) enables her to "find" both her body and her voice...' (Kossew, 'Introduction' xv-xvi)

Korang engages with Grenville's novel Joan Makes History from the perspective of his 'reading self', that is 'African, male, non-white and non-Australian'. Through this experience, he discovers that 'against the ironic necessity of accepting that each time we travel we discover ourselves only, we must posit the freedom to make the disclaimer, postcolonially, that in our worldly encounters we are enjoined to discover in ourselves other selves.'

'Kate Livett's essay concerns the lens of 'the tragic'. This, she argues, enables a reading of Thornhill as a tragically flawed character and provides a fitting genre fro Grenville's empathetic imagination.' (Kossew, 'Introduction' xix)

'In this essay, Sarah Pinto is concerned with the historical novel's imaginative re-creation of historical moments and figures. She considers Grenville's fascination with archival research and with the processes of historical investigation in the context of the seemingly unceasing public debates about The Secret River as a way of explaining why historians felt the need to respond to t he novel. At stake, she suggests, were questions about the ways in which history is told and, in the process, how accounts of history by be differentiated from Historical fiction. Indeed, it is the very notion of empathy that some historians regarded as 'unhistorical'. Pinto argues that the rivalry between history and fiction, and history's claim to have access to a verifiable past, have tended to shut down what could and should be a productiove exchange between the two.'( Kossew, 'Introduction' xix)

'Lynette Russell, in her essay agrees the 'Grenville's novels can be regarded as part of a process of wider reconciliation. Russell's own lack of Aboriginal language and attempts to learn it have led her to identity strongly with the characters in The Lieutenant and, in her essay on the novel, she argues for a reading that explores the role of language in mediating the friendship between black and white Australia. For, she suggests, the stories from the past which novelists like Grenville have uncovered that deal with both that deal with both positive and negative engagements between settler and Indigenous peoples are 'stories that belong to both" groups, the telling and retelling of which "ought to be seen as an exercise in reconciliation."' ( Kossew, 'Introduction', xx)