C arey, P eter

Even though Patrick White won the Nobel Prize in 1973, it was Peter Carey's generation, which also included David Malouf, Kate Grenville, and Frank Moorhouse, whose work brought Australian fiction to the world stage. Of these, Carey's work was both the most popular and the most consequential. Combining the excitement‐filled plots of Victorian fiction, the imaginative splaying of reality and fantasy pioneered by Latin American novelists, and the determination to tell the stories of a largely unknown country shared by so many of his Australian counterparts, Carey canvassed the dreams and nightmares of Australia as no other writer had before him. In a nation whose short history and heritage of conquest, dispossession, and sense of inadequacy toward the rest of the world raised a perpetual sense of self‐doubt, Carey's questioning of the nature of reality would have had pronounced resonance in any case. Carey, though, added to this a particular emphasis on the vocation of the artist, both its soaring possibilities and self‐consuming inauthenticities, and on the way national difference helps define the reception and betrayal of art in an age of globalization. Carey writes about national identity, but he does so in an international arena. His validation of Australian experience opened the door for many Australian writers not only to publish globally, but also to realize there was an audience interested in what they had to say.