SOURCE: "American Dreaming: The Fictions of Peter Carey," in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4, October, 1986, pp. 431-41.

In the following essay, an earlier draft of which was presented at the conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature in July 1986, Turner outlines the major characteristics of Carey's fiction and discusses Carey's use of "American" formal devices to create literature with Australian themes.

Arguments around the concepts of nationalism and internationalism are familiar presences in discussions of Australian literature and other areas of cultural production, such as Australian film. Within such discussions, the internationalist position recommends itself as a kind of sophistication, a smoothing over of the rough edges of parochialism, and the embodiment of wider, even universal, standards of achievement. Peter Carey has been hailed as an international writer. The Sydney Morning Herald review of Bliss [October 10, 1981] is representative in its typing of Carey as a...