Portrayal of the Narrator as a Postmodern Metafictional Historiographer in Peter Carey'sOscar and Lucinda

Abstract

Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, a novel set in the nineteenth century colonial Australia, is an account of the encounter, relation and separation between British Anglican priest, Oscar and Australian industrialist Lucinda. In this historical fiction, Carey makes his contemporary unnamed narrator, Oscar's great grandson, tell (his)tory of fictional characters Oscar, Lucinda and Miriam and their relation and interaction with historical people of the nineteenth century like George Eliot, Thomas Carlyle, J.S. Mill and Others. The narrator seeks the relevance of such past for present without any nostalgic tone. Moreover, he subverts the realist mode of historiography that makes the novel historiographic metafiction and the unnamed narrator as a postmodern metafictional historiographer.