engleski

Storykeepers: Australian Myth in the Works of Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton

The thesis “Storykeepers: Australian Myth in the Works of Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton” traces the formulation of the Australian Myth by placing it in the social and the historical context, and positioning it in relation to the Australian national identity, and then describes the contribution of Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton to its formulation and its decentring (Derrida), respectively. Namely, discursively formulated as the site of the Australian nation, Henry Lawson was formulated as the single most important imaginative influence in the formulation of the self-confident masculine nationalist metanarrative of the nation, while the double-voiced discourse (Bird) of Barbara Baynton not only reveals the difficulties of women’s writing within a nationalist movement, but also points to the fissures in the national metanarrative, and the resultant homogenous, confident and unproblematic national identity. The Myth was defined through the following elements: the Great Australian Dream, the Australian type, the spell of the bush, mateship, and egalitarian democracy, and negatively, the exclusion other races and of women other than in the role of “God’s Police” (Summers). Although excluded from the Myth’s symbolic, transgressive female content is next revealed as its uncanny (Freud). In the second part of the thesis the exemplification of the above elements of the Myth in the works of Lawson and Baynton is analysed, and their contribution to the construction, or the decentring of the Myth described, their Myth-Counter Myth position exemplifying a process of searching for truth – an attempt to come to terms with our “routes” (Hall) and formulate a national identity based on cultural difference (Bhabha), as opposed to claiming to have found the Truth – one fixed, solid and stable, essentialist identity of the nation.

National identity; Australian Myth; construction/deconstruction of national metanarrative; Henry Lawson; Barbara Baynton

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