Peter Carey has been discussed in academia since the 1980s. And since then these discussions revolve around postmodernism, postcolonial studies or, indeed, both at once. So, either Peter Carey has been writing the same old novel for nearly thirty years by now, or there are whole worlds in his writings that have yet to be uncovered. Since I claim the latter is the case, this thesis sets out to chart at least a few areas of these vast forgotten territories, to use a consciously colonial metaphor. The theoretical ‘vehicle’ with which the new areas are entered is agency. Which means that the thesis investigates how individual characters manage to become successful actors, or fail to do so. The thesis first provides an overview of Carey's writing (Chapter 2), then traces three typical 'Carey themes' through his entire oeuvre and shows how they are relevant for agency (Chapter 3), before discussing the concept of agency itself at some length in Chapter 4. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 are close readings of My Life as a Fake, Illywhacker and Tristan Smith and investigate the novels' main characters' development in depth. The appendix contains research that would be relevant for a biographical approach to Carey's works. It explains the climate of Australian literature production in the 1970s in which Carey emerges as an author and that is relevant for his writing up to his latest works Amnesia and a Long Way from Home. It also relates a few biographical notes that are relevant for many of his works.:1. Introduction 4 2. Literary Overview of Carey’s Writing 18 3. Agency in Carey’s Writing: Three ‘Carey Themes’ 29 4. Agency 49 4.1. Important Terminology 49 4.2. Agency: A New Phenomenon? 53 4.3. The Ancient Sources of Agency 62 4.4. The Agency Game: The Sociological Concept of Agency 67 4.5. Agency, Nature, and Metaphysics 76 4.6. The Problem of Normativity 84 4.7. Getting the Moral Framework Back into the Picture 89 4.8. Getting Intrinsic Capacity Back into the Picture 95 4.9. The Whole Picture 100 5. My Life as a Fake 109 5.1. The Story 109 5.2. The Central Conflict: Apollo and Dionysus Caught in a ‘Deathlock’ 112 5.3. My Life as a Fake and the Struggle for Authenticity 125 5.4. Chubb and McCorkle Revisited: Authenticity and the Social Arena 132 5.5. Conclusion 138 6. Illywhacker 141 6.1. Lies and control 148 6.1.1. Book I 149 6.1.2. Book II 156 6.1.3. Book III 164 6.2. Compulsive Visions and Compelled Selves 171 6.2.1. The McGraths: Molly and Jack 185 6.2.2. The Young Compulsive Mistresses 190 6.3. Peter Carey’s Entrapped Dreamers 199 6.4. From the Aircraft Factory to the Museum: Baudrillard in Australia 204 6.4.1. The Three-Tiered Advance of Australia Fair 205 6.4.2. Agency in the Hyperreal Condition 214 6.4.3. Illywhacker and the Western World: Anti-Depressants 217 6.5. Final Remarks on Illywhacker 221 7. Tristan Smith 224 7.1. Tristan as Narrative Voice and as Character inside his Story 228 7.2. Tristan’s Bildung: A Study in two Mirror Phases 231 7.2.1. Initial Conceit 232 7.2.2. The Gaze of the Other 236 7.2.3. The First Mirror Stage 241 7.2.4. Interlude 246 7.2.5. The Voyage 249 7.2.6. The Second Mirror Stage 252 7.3. Tristan’s Subversiveness: “Bodies […] out of Control” 258 7.3.1. Postcolonial Approaches and External Reality 259 7.3.2. Cultural Simulation: Ghostdorps and Ghost Lights 264 7.3.3. Confronting Simulations: Tristan and Peggy 270 7.3.4. Not Escaping the Now: Felicity 275 7.3.5. Jacqui: From Self-Realisation to Escapism and Back to the Now 280 7.4. The Radical’s Conceit: Peter Carey’s Political Activists 287 8. Conclusion 292 9. Bibliography 303 10. Appendix 314 10.1. Publishing Carey: The Emergence of an Author 314 10.2. Peter Carey and the New Nationalism 320 10.3. Biographical Notes on Peter Carey’s Writing 330

<p>This dissertation draws on a broad range of postcolonial literature in order to explore literary representations of environmentalism in the global South. Although this project draws heavily on the particular environmental histories of different nations and geographic regions, I am also interested in areas of overlap. In this study I do two interrlated and simultaneous things that I hope will refine postcolonial ecocriticism. The first involves a broadening of the definition of 'environment,' informed by the environmental justice movment, in ways that make it more applicable and accountable to people's lived lives. This expanded definition of the environment includes those spaces where people live and work. Such a redefinition, I argue, is a crucial counter-measure to ecocriticism's Anglo-American focus, where traditional American environmental values of conservation, preservation, and the cult of the wilderness prevail. The second intervention involves using ecocriticism alongside this expanded notion of the environment to unearth the everyday environmentalisms at work in postcolonial literature that may go unnoticed through traditional ecocritical approaches. I argue that this everyday approach successfully avoids some of the common hurdles in postcolonial ecocriticism. These hurdles include debates over the origins of environmental thought, questions about the link between affluence and environmental consciousness, and the contentious space of animals in postcolonial thought and literature. By beginning with an examination of the ways in which people interact with their own local environments, I am able to explore environmental thought and action on the ground and can begin theorizing there. What is revealed through these analyses is that this expanded definition of environmentalism and this new ecocritical approach open the door to viewing environmentality as a common and foundational feature of postcolonial literature. My chapters explore various facets of these everyday environmentalisms, including ecofeminist perspectives, anthropocentric versus biocentric representations of the environment, urban space, and finally the idea of going back to the land. The issues that I explore throughout these chapters include legacies of colonialism, globalization, racism and speceism, ecolocial/ecocritical imperialism, and postcoloniality.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The liberation war was a watershed event in the history of Zimbabwe. According to the ZANU PF (Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front) ruling elites, an understanding of the common experiences of the people during the liberation war provides the best opportunity to mold a common national identity and consciousness. However, the representation of important historical events in a nation's history is problematic. At best events are manipulated for political purposes by the ruling elites, and at the worst they are distorted or exaggerated. In Zimbabwe, the representation of the ZAPU/ZIPRA and the ZANU/ZANLA as liberation movements in high school history textbooks during the armed struggle is a hot potato. This study critically examined and explored the contested "representational practices" of the ZAPU/ZIPRA and the ZANU/ZANLA as liberation movements during the Zimbabwean armed revolution. By means of qualitative content analysis, seven high school history textbooks from Zimbabwe were analyzed. Drawing from postcolonial perspectives and insights, particularly Fanon's concept of the pitfall of national consciousness, the study unveiled the way in which Zimbabwean high school textbooks portrayed the ZAPU/ZIPRA and the ZANU/ZANLA as very different liberation movements whose roles and contributions were unequal. High school textbooks depicted the ZANU/ZANLA as a radical revolutionary and people-oriented liberation movement totally committed to the armed struggle and the ZAPU/ZIPRA as a moderate party not dedicated to the armed revolution. In a nutshell, the high school history textbooks glorified and celebrated the political and military achievements of the ZANU/ZANLA and suppressed while not completely ignoring those of the ZAPU/ZIPRA. Although the findings of this study will not solve the problem of high school textbooks (mis) representation of the roles and contributions of the ZAPU/ZIPRA and the ZANU/ZANLA in the armed struggle, the study can serve as a "tool of resistance" by exposing the continual abuse and misuse of history education by postcolonial ruling elites to preservice teachers, classroom teachers, teacher education programs and textbook publishers.

This essay concerns Purple Hibiscus and Kambili's emotional development, and explores how violence, submission and emotional dependence along with a traditional feminine gender role can hinder acknowledgement of trauma. I propose that Kambili is encouraged to take on a culturally expected feminine gender role, and her submissive disposition is discussed and connected to her constant search for a father figure. The notion of personal and collective postcolonial trauma is explained and applied to contextualise her inability to question either her father or the political situation in Nigeria. I read Kambili's change as negative and aim to show that she has internalised patriarchal structures. Her change is contrasted to the change in her brother Jaja, to show how and why they develop in different directions. Traditional gender roles are discussed from a rather general perspective, but also in a context that concern masculinity, violence and power relations.

This thesis problematizes the recent transdisciplinary turn to melancholia by grounding the concept within the literature of three contemporary Algerian authors: Assia Djebar, Yasmina Khadra, and Boualem Sansal. If Freud figured melancholia as a pathological response to loss, much recent scholarship has reconceptualized it as an ethico-political model of remembrance that safeguards the memory of the lost or marginalized other. Yet the recent and ubiquitous depathologization of melancholia is only possible insofar as theorists overlook its more insidious elements. By analyzing how melancholia emerges within the postcolonial novels of Djebar, Khadra, and Sansal, this thesis reveals how melancholia in fact undermines an ethico-politics of remembrance, further displacing those lost others that theorists of melancholia would recuperate. Divided into two sections, the first part of the thesis thus challenges the ethico-political viability of melancholia as a mnemonic model. Through close readings of the texts, the first four chapters reveal postcolonial melancholia in Algeria to be imbricated in amnesia, immobility, repetition, victimhood, apolitical retrospection, and the unethical appropriation of the lost object. Part II investigates how the authors imagine different models of remembrance that move beyond the limits of the mourning and melancholia dyad. If melancholia has been depathologized, it nonetheless remains ensnared within a binary system in which the subject either forgets (mourns) or engages in a putative act of hyper-remembrance (melancholia). Building upon the recent theory of Dominick LaCapra, Mireille Rosello, and Judith Butler, the final two chapters explore the critical potential of ‘working upon’ the past. As an on-going and conscious model of remembrance, ‘working upon’ actively resists the closure inherent to mourning but it also circumvents the melancholic (re)appropriation of the past and its lost others. Ultimately, then, this thesis signals the need for emergent models of memorialization that move beyond the restrictions of the Freudian binary of mourning and melancholia.

Janet Frame (1924-2004) is known for being one of the most prolific, translated, and unconventional New Zealand novelists. Her work, however, includes a vast production of poems, which scholars and translators have ignored or, at least, not considered worthy for a comprehensive approach to her. Frame's work has undergone the further limitation of a strongly biography-based hermeneutics: from the gossiping around her alleged schizophrenia, to the popularity of the filmic version of her autobiography (An Angel at My Table) by Jane Campion, and the countless legends that have sprung around her, she has often been stigmatised and labelled the 'mad writer' of Campion's movie. This thesis links the risks of the life/myth-driven perspectives to the current lack of interest in Frame's poetry. Her poetic production is here presented as a fundamental part of her oeuvre and her idiosyncratic approach to writing. Therefore, this study aims to fill this gap in the literature on Frame and thus reconfigure her role as a poet. Through a combination of methodologies grounded in literary and verse translation theories, creativity and genre studies, poststructuralism and postcolonialism, this thesis investigates the most significant traits of Frame's prose and poetry, particularly the traits shared by both. It critiques past translations of Frame's prose into Italian where these have not taken into account the poetic value of her work, and suggests strategies for the translation of her verse into Italian, arguing that an informed approach to her poetry in translation may greatly contribute to a reconfiguration and re-evaluation of her legacy.

I denna uppsats studeras hur Matt 7:24-30 har kommit att tolkats i modern tid av feministiska exegeter. Först ur en västerländsk kontext för att sedan övergå till en postkolonial kontext i Indien och södra Asien. I och med detta undersöks frågan: Hur har feministiska exegeter från olika kulturella kontexter förhållit sig till frågan om etnicitet, kön och tolkningen av de grekiska begreppen för barn respektive hundar i Mark 7:24-30?

This research looks at contemporary understandings of performance arts in India, specifically Karnatic Music and Bharatnatyam as ‘religious’ arts. Historically, music and dance were performed and patronized in royal courts and temples. In the early 20th century, increased nationalist activities led to various forms of self-scrutiny about what represented ‘true’ Indian culture. By appropriating colonial discourses based on the religious/secular dichotomy, Karnatic Music was carefully constructed to represent a ‘pure’ Indian, specifically ‘Hindu’ culture that was superior to the ‘materialistic’ Western culture. Importantly, the category called divine was re-constructed and distinguished from the erotic: the divine was represented as a category that was sacred whilst the erotic represented ‘sexual impropriety.’ In so doing, performance arts in the public sphere became explicitly gendered. Feminity and masculinity were re-defined: the female body was re-imagined as ‘sexual impropriety’ when in the public sphere, but when disembodied in the private sphere could be deified as a guardian of spirituality. Traditional performing communities were marginalized while the newly defined music and dance was appropriated by the Brahmin community, who assumed the role of guardians of the newly constructed Indian-Hindu identity, resulting in caste-based ‘ownership’ of performance arts. Mechanical reproduction of Karnatic Music has created a disconnect in contemporary Indian society, in which Karnatic Music is disembodied from its contexts in order to be commodified as an individual’s artistic expression of creativity. This move marks a shift from substantive economics (music was performed and experienced within a specific context, be it royal patronage or Indian nationalist movements) to formal economics (music as a performer’s creative property). I question the understanding of Karnatic Music as ‘religious’ music that is distinguished from the ‘secular’ and seek to understand the colonial patriarchal mystification of the female body in the private sphere by deconstructing the definition of the ‘divine.’ In doing so, I also question the contemporary understanding of Karnatic Music as an item of property that disembodies the music from its historical context.

The purpose of this degree project is to examine to what extent certain groups in society are represented in the teaching material in upper secondary schools in Sweden. Through the scrutinizing of a selected number of English textbooks, the intention is to analyse texts and images to see whether representation of individuals on the basis of ethnicity, gender, gender identity and sexual orientation occur in the material. Another aspect of the essay is to identify possible stereotypes regarding the mentioned categories. The analyses draw on a number of theories: postcolonial, feminist and gender, as well as queer theories, in order to relate possible non-representation in the teaching material to the key concept of otherness. Furthermore, the concepts of hegemony and heteronormativity serve an important role in the analyses of the material as they expose dominant structures in society which tend to give certain groups authority over others.

In this master’s thesis, which takes the format of an introductory chapter, publishable paper, and conclusion, I examined camp programs for Indigenous youth that are run by Christian organizations in Canada, with the goals of bringing attention to this phenomenon and provoking dialogue on possibilities (or impossibilities) of reconciliation in these contexts. I employed an exploratory case study methodology, using semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, and internet-mediated document analysis, to address the following research questions: i) What are the key characteristics of summer camps for Indigenous youth run by Christian organizations in Canada?; ii) To what extent are Indigenous staff members or volunteers and Indigenous cultures included at summer camps for Indigenous youth that are run by Christian organizations in Canada?; and iii) What does or could reconciliation look like in the context of these camps?, and present results and conclusions based on the collected data. This work is particularly timely and significant in light of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) and broader work for decolonization and improved relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada.