Australian Melodramas: Thomas Keneally's Fiction

This first comprehensive critical study of Keneally's work concentrates on his many novels, but covers plays and nonfiction as well. It also analyses the vexed and often bitter academic reception that Keneally has endured, which in turn illuminates crucial aspects of Australian cultural history, not least as regards the Aborigines and the republican movement. Thomas Keneally is the writer most attuned to the melodramatic temper and genius of Australian literary culture. His characters inhabit a world where moral bearings have been lost, the innocent are preyed upon by the malevolent, and dichotomies are ruthlessly insisted upon - between Europeans and Aborigines, English and Irish, convicts and gaolers, rich and poor. In the agitated and polarised terrain of Keneally's fiction, moral choices are extreme matters, the fates of individuals and of nations lie in perpetual jeopardy.