Some Further Aspects of Ralph Rashleigh
Abstract
John Barnes' has said "that Tucker's performance in Ralph Rashleigh is remarkable for the detachment with which he manages to describe the horrors he had been through as a convict, and for what is, by the standards of the period, a relative literary sophistication", and that irony is one of his defense weapons "against the raw and violent life which he is presenting"; and adds that "he (Tucker) is reassuring himself and us by being civilized". Irony does imply some detachment, yet paradoxically it is very much the voice of the author. The statement "defence against the raw and violent life" may be true, yet the mode chosen by James Tucker is essentially one of documentation, a survey which is itself by its very nature detached and civilized and therefore not self-consciously used as a "defence".
References
John Barnes, The Literature of Australia, ed. Geoffrey Dutton (Penguin, 1964), pp. 144-5.
Barry Argyle, An Introduction to the Australian Novel 1830-1930 (Oxford, 1972), pp. 62-3.
Ibid., p.62.
Ralph Rashleigh (Sydney, 1952), p.6.
Ibid., p. 85. See also S.J. Baker: The Australian Language (Second Edition. Sydney, 1966).
Baker, p.418.
Rashleigh, p. 68.
The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh. A Penal Exile in Australia 1825-1844 (Jonathan Cape, 1929; 1940), p.84.
Argyle, op. cit., p. 62.
Ibid., p. 83.
James Tucker, Jemmy Green in Australia. A Comedy in Three Acts. ed. Colin Roderick (Sydney, 1955), p. 2.
Ralph Rashleigh, p. 49.
Ibid., p. 303.
Jemmy Green in Australia, p. 29.
The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh,pp. 214-215, 73.
Ralph Rashleigh,p. 190, 191, 59.
The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh,p. 346. And the same passage in Ralph Rashleigh,p. 301.
Ralph Rashleigh, p. 302.
Ibid., p. 59.
Ibid., p. 190.
Ralph Rashleigh, pp. 183, 190, 204, 213, 283.
Ibid., p. 47.
Beowulf, L 120.
Ralph Rashleigh, p. 167.
Ibid., p. 72-3.
0p. cit., p. 64.
Ralph Rashleigh, p. 20.
Ibid., p. 31.
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