Originally presented as the author's Ph. D. thesis at the University of Melbourne.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 283-301) and index.

Preliminary Material / A. Frances Johnson -- Introduction: Making and Unmaking the Postcolonial Historical Novel / A. Frances Johnson -- Genre Memory: Australian Historical Novels in Context / A. Frances Johnson -- Intertextuality and the Postcolonial Novel of History / A. Frances Johnson -- Elision and Engagement: Writing Indigeneity in Post-Bicentennial Historical Novels / A. Frances Johnson -- Postmodern Rats in the Ranks: The Novelist and the Historian as Raiders of the Colonial Archive / A. Frances Johnson -- Speaking in Tongues: The Novelist as Historiographic Fool / A. Frances Johnson -- Writing South of South: Extinction Discourse in Novelizations of Tasmanian Colonial Pasts / A. Frances Johnson -- Conclusion: Beyond the Dry Dock / A. Frances Johnson -- Appendix 1: Postcolonial/Post-Colonial Debates in Context / A. Frances Johnson -- Appendix 2: Lessons in ‘The Lost Garden’: A First-Contact Tasmanian Historical Novel in Progress / A. Frances Johnson -- Works Cited / A. Frances Johnson -- Index / A. Frances Johnson.

Available to subscribing member institutions only.

Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage examines key developments in the field of the Australian postcolonial historical novel from 1989 to the present. In parallel with this analysis, A. Frances Johnson undertakes a unique study of in-kind creativity, reflecting on how her own nascent historical fiction has been critically and imaginatively shaped and inspired by seminal experiments in the genre – by writers as diverse as Kate Grenville, Mudrooroo, Kim Scott, Peter Carey, Richard Flanagan, and Rohan Wilson. Mapping the postcolonial novel against the impact of postcolonial cultural theory and Australian writers’ intermittent embrace of literary postmodernism, this survey is also read against the post-millenial ‘history’ and ‘culture wars’ which saw politicizations of national debates around history and fierce contestation over the ways stories of Australian pasts have been written.