Careyesque

comparative more Careyesque · superlative most Careyesque

1. Characteristic of Peter Carey (born 1943), Australian novelist.

   Peter Carey summons and subverts the myth in this ‘true and secret’ history of Ned Kelly.[…]Its form is indeed Careyesque, from the outset playing with notions of invention, lies and truth, a preoccupation present in earlier novels such as Illywhacker.

   2000 October 21, “Such is his life”, in The Age, section “Extra”, page 9

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   PETER CAREY is almost alone among contemporary novelists in never writing the same book twice.[…]There is, by now, this fifth novel, a definitely Careyesque body of concerns; the carnival, the fragility and terrifying energy of art, a strange knot of ideas which can be summed up as Heaven, Hell, and Disneyland.

   1994 October 11, “Heaven and Disneyland”, in The Guardian, London; Manchester, page 8

   In fact, Conrad assiduously weaves into his narrative novelists’ and poets’ imaginative responses to the tensions and self-inflicted incongruities between the town and the scrub, with frequent references to Murray Bail, Patrick White, Peter Carey and Les Murray.[…]Peter Raftos’s Careyesque anti-capitalist parable ‘Quark’ is also memorable.

   2004, Australian Book Review, pages 13 and 58

   Peter Carey is the first of the two Australian authors considered in this study whom critics often refer to as a ‘prophet’.[…]This represents a prime example of the characteristic Careyesque combination of compassionate empathy towards the characters and the cold analysis of satire.

   2004, Sigrun Meinig, Witnessing the Past: History and Post-Colonialism in Australian Historical Novels, Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen, →ISBN, pages 109 and 154

   Careyesque features such as self-consciousness, playing with reader expectations, a concern with authenticity and fakery, an obsession about lies and truths, all fall into place as components of a fictional discourse on controversial issues of Australia’s past and present – many of which are political potatoes of the hottest kind.

   2005, Andreas Gaile, “Introduction”, in Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey (Cross/Cultures 78), Editions Rodopi B.V., →ISBN, pages xxi–xxii

   The novels of Kate Grenville, Peter Carey, and Kim Scott, in this respect, can only be regarded as literary forms that are produced in, for, and by a particular contemporary colonial culture.[…]We might find ourselves wishing for an adjacent Indigenous story of place and space, even reportage in the Careyesque sense, or an addled diatribe from Holland’s point of view, so that Holland’s own botanical obsessions might be more fully ironized – so that the character’s claim on the landscape might read as an imposition, a claim “by all other [here we read: English] national landscapes” on contested country.

   2016, A. Frances Johnson, Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage: Making and Unmaking the Postcolonial Novel, Leiden; Boston: Brill Rodopi, →ISBN, pages 53 and 76