Peter Carey

Peter Carey: The Making of a Global Novelist recounts Peter Carey’s literary career from his emergence in the Australian literary scene as a contributor to local literary magazines to when he published his fiction exclusively with large conglomerate publishers. As Australia’s most decorated author for a period nearing half a century, Carey’s career gives unparalleled insights into the global contemporary publishing and the making of global literary prestige from the periphery, and significant cultural currency for Australian literature and culture worldwide. Carey’s fiction is not only a product of the global dynamic in literary publishing of the last quarter of the twentieth century, but also it holds something of its productive tension for Australian writing and writers. Allahyari retraces the fraught synthesis of an individual literary proclivity with a growing commercial cultural appetite: the coincidence of Carey’s career with the conglomeration of global publishing pushedfurther towards anti-elitist, popular aesthetics.
Keyvan Allahyari teaches in the English and Theatre Studies Program at the University of Melbourne. He specializes in world literatures and contemporary Australian literature with a dual focus on border regimes and water imaginaries. His peer-reviewed journal articles have appeared in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Australian Humanities Review, JASAL, and Antipodes, among others. He is currently writing a book about Abdulrazak Gurnah and the oceanic world literatures.