SOURCE: Kane, Paul. “Postcolonial/Postmodern: Australian Literature and Peter Carey.” World Literature Today 67, no. 3 (summer 1993): 519-22.

In the following essay, Kane investigates the duality of Carey's body of work and asserts that Carey's novels not only incorporate postcolonial themes but also follow postmodern styles and ideals.

What space does Australian literature occupy today in world literature? Embedded in that question is a spatial metaphor that could easily be converted into a temporal one: what are the historical vectors that have determined the present moment of Australian literature? Taken together, the two questions open up the ground of a theoretical inquiry, all the more so since there is no necessary relationship between the two words Australian and literature. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as Australian literature (in the way one could refer to Anglophone or Francophone literature); what we are really talking about is literature-written-in-English-in-Australia during the...