Settler literature and the Booker Prize: transnational literatures and metropolitan reception, 1985-2000

This thesis explores the influence of the Booker Prize on transnational literary circulation — specifically that of Anglophone settler novels from New Zealand, Australia and Canada. Drawing distinctions between the desires of local and international audiences in these countries, the thesis examines work that has been locally but not transnationally canonized. It compares this work in each case to texts from the same country which have circulated transnationally and been recognized by the Booker Prize. The three winners of the prize examined here (Keri Hulme, Peter Carey and Margaret Atwood) found international success according to distinguishing criteria that discouraged reading for settler commonalities in favour of giving information about a particular place or group whose uniqueness is emphasised. Meanwhile, texts which remained locally circulated (by John Mulgan, Gerald Murnane, Leonard Cohen and Sheila Watson) are more productively read for commonalities. In the first chapter, the Māori Keri Hulme’s Booker winner The Bone People is read to show how features common to a literary tradition shared with the Pākehā John Mulgan’s Man Alone, and theorised across settler contexts, are read as markers of indigeneity because of prize culture. In the second chapter, Peter Carey (primarily in his True History of the Kelly Gang ) is read as dealing with cultural cringe by emphasising Australian quiddity and uniqueness, as well as by presenting (Irish) Australians as colonised rather than colonisers. The less well-known Gerald Murnane, especially in The Plains, avoids this by emphasising individual subjectivity over group identity, but the individual subjectivities he presents have been shaped by a settler colonial context. The third chapter examines how the state funding of literary production in Canada has created a bifurcated model where certain texts — Margaret Atwood’s earlier work, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook — respond closely to the concerns of different groups within and shaped by a settler state, especially when read hermeneutically. Meanwhile literature for export, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, instead responds to mimetic readings — such as in the context of the Booker — that establish a unitary and exotic Canadian identity for metropolitan readers. The conclusion briefly examines a final text, the South African Damon Galgut’s Booker-winning The Promise, to show the recurrence of patterns already identified throughout the thesis.

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