Curated Fiction: Intersections of Truth and Voice in the Composition of a Contemporary Australian Novel

Creative Project: The Sand, novel manuscript The Sand is based loosely on a Tasmanian cold case, the as yet unsolved murder of an Italian backpacker on an east coast beach in broad daylight in October 1995. Events in the novel unfold over a period of approximately 7 days after the body of Maria Fabri is found on the local beach of a small Tasmanian town. Several characters offer their perspectives on the ramifications of this crime on their community, and the conceit of Curated Fiction is used to enact one of them, Sally Ringholt, as curator— the commissioner, collator and editor of the other accounts. Several stories emerge in the wake of an act of shocking violence: stories of acceptance, tolerance, grief, change and compassion. These are underscored by the dawning realisation that, for the people resident in this small coastal town, the world has inexplicably shifted on its axis: the familiar is no longer comfortable, and someone among them has a terrible secret. THESIS The thesis defines Curated Fiction as a narrative framework for the development/construction of long-form works of fiction. Curated Fiction brings together several concepts from literary theory, including multiple homodiegetic narration, talk fiction, closed storyworlds and authorial objectivity, unreliable narration, and ethical considerations of fiction as a site of truth. Additional paradigms are drawn from the work of Gerald Prince (the “disnarrated”) and Mikhail Bakhtin (“polyphony”). Three novels are used as exemplars for analysis of these pillars of Curated Fiction: Waterland and Last Orders by Graham Swift, and As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. The dissertation also provides an exegetical account of the manuscript, The Sand, a novel which draws upon Curated Fiction as its motivating force.