This chapter examines postmodernist and literary experiments in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific. It first considers Australia's brand of postmodernism, noting that it was much less a reaction to modernism than an effect of American influences that developed mid-century and a reflection on its late emergence from the colonial condition. It shows that Australian literature and its institutions since the 1930s had maintained a distant and uncomfortable relationship with literary modernism. Key writers discussed include Peter Carey, Gerald Murnane, and Elizabeth Jolley. The chapter goes on to discuss how Canada's scholars and writers, such as Robert Kroetsch, George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt have been interwoven in the genealogy of postmodern fiction in the Americas before concluding with an analysis of the postmodern novel in New Zealand and the South Pacific. Important writers here include Ian Wedde, Albert Wendt, and Sia Figiel.
Dionne Brand and Alanis Obomsawin: polyphony in the poetics of resistance
