Levels of life

Modernity and modernism in David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter

Authors

  • Kay Ferres Griffith University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2016.33

Keywords:

David Malouf, 'Fly Away Peter', modernist techniques, impact of modernity

Abstract

David Malouf’s novel Fly Away Peter (1982) uses modernist techniques to describe the impact of modernity on the emergent Australian nation. At its centre is the country lad Jim Saddler, who dies in the industrialised battlefield in France. His fate is entwined with that of his friend Ashley Crowther, who inherits his family’s property, and whose embrace of modernity includes a determination to preserve the land and its wildlife. Ashley recognises the value of Jim’s instinctive connection with the natural world, and his knowledge of, and fascination with, birds. This fascination aligns Jim with the photographer Imogen Harcourt. Miss Harcourt is a modern woman, using the new technologies of representation to record the natural world, its movement and change. At the novella’s end, it is Imogen who turns her lens towards a new future, as her grief for Jim is transfigured through an epiphanic vision of a surfer riding the waves to the beach.

Author Biography

  • Kay Ferres, Griffith University

    Kay Ferres is Professor of Literary Studies and Cultural History at Griffith University. She works in the field of twentieth-century fiction, with a focus on women writers and Australian writing.

References

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Published

2016-12-01

How to Cite

Ferres, K. (2016). Levels of life: Modernity and modernism in David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter. Queensland Review, 23(2), 258-269. https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2016.33