Robert Clarke (University of Tasmania, Australia)
Maggie Nolan (Australian Catholic University)
In Postcolonial Theory Leela Gandhi suggests that “the colonial aftermath calls for an ameliorative and therapeutic theory which is responsive to the task of remembering and recalling the colonial past” (Gandhi 8). For some postcolonial literary scholars, such a theory has meant developing reading practices that facilitate readers’ reckoning with the past through the medium of fiction. However one frames inquiries into the role that fiction plays in the postcolonial refashioning of national historical narratives towards some notion of reconciliation, it is clear that we need to reframe our understanding of the reading subject of such theory. This involves shifting from a reader assumed to be an academic who occupies some position within or in relation to formal, usually tertiary, educational institutions: not unlike the theorists who posit such views in the first place. A perhaps unintended consequence of such views is that the reading practices, and what we call the vernacular criticism of lay readers, are often either ignored, discounted or rendered suspect. This paper reports on our research to understand Australia, the reception of historical fiction amongst lay readers – and a specific subset of lay reader, namely book clubs readers. We consider a group of novels that we term fictions of reconciliation that provide excellent opportunities for such work given their popularity, the controversies that they have in some instances incited, and the way they foreground contemporary ethical and political concerns about Australian race relations and the legacies of colonial violence. We are concerned with the assumptions that critics make about the intellectual, moral and political perspicacity of so-called “ordinary” readers, a term that we seek, among other things, to problematise.
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