Promoting Postcolonial Australia

Promoting Postcolonial Australia: New Readings of Miles Franklin and Joseph Furphy uses Australian literary practice as a case study in the emergence of modern democratic literary culture. John Uhr merges traditional political theory and contemporary literary theory in this political reinterpretation of novels by two classic Australian writers: the feminist Miles Franklin and civic republican Joseph Furphy.

Uhr examines three of Franklin’s novels: My Brilliant Career, Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, and All that Swagger. He also surveys two of Furphy’s novels: Rigby’s Romance and The Buln-Buln and the Brolga, which were both written under Furphy’s pseudonym Tom Collins.

Despite their reputations as Australian nationalists, Uhr argues that Franklin and Furphy should be seen as pioneering examples of postcolonial literary theory, as later devised by the late literary critic Edward Said. Said’s framework is surprisingly relevant to writers like Franklin and Furphy, who blend pre-modern or Stoic philosophy and post-liberal or communitarian perspectives in their critical portraits of the limits of conventional liberalism for emerging democracies.