This thesis is composed of two parts: an exegesis, which examines how uncertainty, multiplicity and paradox have been negotiated in works of 'actualist' historical fiction, and a creative component, the novel Half-Wild, which explores the multiple identities and contradictory accounts at play in the various lives of the historical figure Eugenia Falleni (1875-1938). The exegesis opens with an examination of the influence that 'uncertainty', as described by the 'new physics', has had on the twentieth-century literary imagination. It focuses in particular on the relationship between Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg's interpretation of quantum physics and the troubling of history, gender and identity in narrative fiction. Susan Strehle's definition of 'actualist' fiction-positioned between realism and metafiction-is introduced in order to discuss works of historical fiction that engage with uncertain, dynamic pasts, as opposed to a fixed, fact-focused past. The argument continues with a close reading of Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety and Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, two novels engaged in 'actual' history which oscillate between realism and metafiction in order to destabilise the received versions of their referent subjects and events. These novels are selected as examples of how historical fiction's emphasis is not now on the determining of fact, but on the engagement with history as an act or process-a writing through fact and interaction with sources, a combining, recombining and troubling of possible ways things were, without eschewing the integrity of the facts themselves. The exegesis concludes with an extended analysis of the sources pertaining to the life, trial for murder, and death of the historical figure Eugenia Falleni, and how these sources have been used, ignored, or interacted with by other authors who have narrativised her life. I continue the argument by applying the principles of Strehle's actualist fiction in my own novel, Half-Wild. The novel explores themes of indeterminacy, possibility, and paradox within representations of Falleni's life by allowing contradictory versions of her story to co-exist in the same narrative. It makes use of collage and the juxtaposition of documentary materials, such as newspaper reports and court transcripts, as well as first-person narration and free indirect style to perform an 'inhabitation' of multiple, often contradictory, points of view. The novel is divided into five parts, each focusing on a different persona of Falleni's: as tomboy Tally Ho growing up in Wellington, New Zealand; as the adult called both Harry and Jack Crawford in Sydney; as the cross-dressing Italian woman Nina Falleni; as the 'man-woman' convicted by the judiciary and Australian tabloid press of murdering her first wife, Annie; and as Jean Ford, a woman lying in a coma at Sydney Hospital after being struck by a car on Oxford St, Paddington, eight years after her release from prison. For a writer in 2016, it is difficult to affect a nai¨ve obliviousness to how narrative frameworks manipulate the aspects of the past being described, or to how that past is itself linguistic, fictive, and performative in nature. With Falleni's story refracted into five parts, each part destabilises the others: any reference to one 'authentic' self underpinning her various personae is avoided, allowing contradiction to inform the multiple expressions of her fluid identity, and, at the same time, the parts to operate as their own complete, immersive fiction-worlds, each contextualising one of the many 'authentic' selves.
Date of Award | 2016 |
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Original language | English |
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