1 - The Global Invention of the Australian Novel

Summary

This chapter considers ways in which the Australian novel emerged in the early nineteenth century through a cross-pollination of different genres and narrative styles that moved across national boundaries. It discusses the institutional assumptions that have informed the construction of national literatures more generally, while examining the intermixture of fact and fiction that gave impetus to the formation of the Australian novel. It discusses in particular how Henry Savery’s Quintus Servinton and James Tucker’s Ralph Rashleigh reimagine the traditional cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Europe, creating an idiom of mock epic that speaks to a new world of political radicalism and moral ambivalence. Such ambiguities are also traced in John Lang’s The Forger’s Wife and Lady Mary Fox’s Account of an Expedition to the Interior of New Holland, with the latter indicating how the eighteenth-century philosophical novel continued to shape nineteenth-century Australian fiction. This mixture of influences is also considered in relation to novels by Charles Rowcroft, Alexander Harris, Louisa Atkinson, Anna Maria Bunn and others, suggesting that early Australian fiction encompasses a greater geographical and intellectual range than is commonly assumed. The essay concludes that the early Australian novel should properly be understood as a compelling and significant part of World Literature.