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Abstract
This thesis examines four novels as case studies of the mode of allegory in post-colonial Australian literature.
Allegory is a mode of fiction in which a hidden narrative is concealed below a surface narrative. Furthermore, when the hidden narrative is revealed, the surface narrative and its discursive codes become transformed. Post-colonial critics have argued that one aspect of post-colonial literature is the use of allegory in a way that the hidden narrative interpolates the surface narrative. This process of allegorical interpolation is one of the ways post-colonial literature is able to transform colonial discourses.
Through an analysis of the four novels, I argue that allegory is a significant aspect of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian writing in its depiction of the natural environment and the settler nation. Bringing together ecological theory with post-colonial theories of allegory, I coin the term 'ecological allegory' to describe a specific type of allegory in which nature as subject becomes revealed within the 'hidden' narrative of the text. Through this process of interpolation, the literary representation of the land is being transformed as the natural environment is depicted as a dialogical subject.
In the explication of the four novels as ecological allegories, I provide new readings of two canonical Australian texts, Remembering Babylon and Tourmaline, as well as, readings of two lesser known Indigenous Australian texts, Earth and Steam Pigs. I argue that theories of ecology provide a means for understanding the texts' representation of nature as subject. The allegorical mode of the novels offers a literary form whereby the natural environment as subject may be able to be represented in discursive language. Furthermore, in these allegories, the polysemy in the written mode of Australian literature is able to express the oral Indigenous worldview of Country, the land as a living entity.
The claim that these texts are constructed as allegories, rather than simply reading the texts allegorically (known as allegoresis), combined with the methodology of ecological theory, to create a new term - ecological allegory - is an original way of reading Australian literature. Furthermore, my term 'ecological allegory' is an innovation in literary theory and its understanding of literary representations of the natural environment.