Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (Australian Cultural Studies)

"Dark Side of the Dream" offers an assessment of Australian literature from a postcolonial perspective. Taking a post-bicentenary look at Australian culture and society through its literature, the authors argue that the shape of Australian society and literature has been profoundly affected by the processes that began when a colonizing society from Britain invaded Aboriginal Australia and dispossessed its people. "Australia" is not simply an autonomous White society; it also includes Aboriginal people and cultures and the problems of their relationship to the cultural practices of the colonizers. Nearly half of the book deals with Aboriginal texts, issues and themes, in recognition that this dimension of Australian literature is usually neglected. It also refers to recent work from Marxist, feminist and multicultural perspectives in order to analyze the "traditional" canon of Australian literature.