- Title
- Glissando - a melodrama.
- Creator
- Musgrave, David
- Relation
- http://sleeperspublishing.com/2011/product-1/
- Publisher
- Sleepers
- Resource Type
- book
- Date
- 2010
- Description
- Glissando is a Menippean satire, a form which has roots going back over 2,000 years to the Ancient Greeks. It is a form characterised by ‘radical heterogeneity’ (Musgrave 2013, 22) and in the case of Glissando, the bildungsroman, the diaristic and epistolary novel, the novel of ideas, plays, poems and newspaper articles are interwoven into a heterogeneous whole. The novel also contains within it an extended parody of Patrick White’s Voss. As such, the novel parodies ‘the great Australian novel’, and in so doing it interrogates a number of assumptions prevalent in realist fiction. One of these is that the work is ‘is highly suspicious of the masks we wear, and of the impossibility of putting on a true face for the world’ (Williamson). In this regard, the novel is an examination of play as something that is necessary, serious and comic at the same time. Brian McHale has stated that ‘postmodernist fiction is the heir of Menippean satire and its most recent historical avatar’ (McHale 172-73). By returning to the ancient form of Menippean satire, Glissando reassess the relevance of postmodernist fiction as a means to interrogate modern individual and national identity.
- Subject
- Menippean satire; parody; realist novel; Australian fiction
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1059080
- Identifier
- uon:16520
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781740669337
- Language
- eng
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