Thomas Keneally Summary

Thomas Keneally (born 1935) is an Australian novelist and nonfiction writer who gained worldwide attention when his best-known work, the Holocaust novel Schindler's List, was adapted into an Academy A... Read more

An Australian Catholic with no immediate ties to the Holocaust, Thomas Keneally had written sixteen novels before Schindler's List (first published as Schindler's Ark, 1982) and has continued to prod... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert E. Mcdowell In the course of doing research for a World War I film script, the Australian Thomas Keneally was, fortunately for novel readers, sidetracked into an exhaustive st... Read more

Critical Essay by Peter Ackroyd Although the publishers describe [A Victim of the Aurora] as 'Thomas Keneally's first detective story', it effectively marks the demise of that deb... Read more

Critical Essay by Vivian Fuchs The early years of this century were the heroic years of Antarctic exploration and it is in this period that A Victim of the Aurora is set. The pity is that, unreal thou... Read more

Critical Essay by Blake Morrison Thomas Keneally's fictions are widely travelled: medieval Normandy, an 18th-century penal colony in the South Pacific, France in 1918, the Antarctic (twice)... Read more

Critical Essay by D. J. Enright At first sight, the donnée of Thomas Keneally's new novel [Passenger] lies in its narrator, a foetus…. 'The rose or weed of knowledge opened... Read more

Critical Essay by Daphne Merkin "Passenger" is a wonderfully poised novel. It rattles along at great speed without ever missing out on the telling, piquantly humorous detail. Mr. Keneall... Read more

Critical Essay by Michael Ratcliffe I confess to finding the randy villain of that uterine jest [Passenger] a more sharply conceived and executed figure than any of those who toil through the mud and ... Read more

Critical Essay by Veronica Brady Thomas Keneally has always aimed at high seriousness. His works reveal an epic ambition, attempting to reconcile with domestic reality the consciousness of some larger... Read more

Critical Essay by Edmund Fuller [In Passenger, Thomas Keneally] has written the first novel to have its narrator and protagonist in utero throughout: the child in the womb of Sal Fitzgerald. With para... Read more

Critical Essay by Jeffrey Burke "Confederates" is exceptional in the Keneally corpus for its American—namely, Civil War—setting, yet typical of an author who has continuall... Read more

In the review below, Conrad finds the arguments and production values of Memoirs from a Young Republic "shockingly amateurish.". Writers are the makers and the keepers of a nation'... Read more

In the following review, McCulloughassesses the narrative style of A River Town. Traditionally, the annual announcement of the Booker Prize, Britain's most famous fiction award, comes accompani... Read more

In the following essay, Ryan compares the authorial perspectives of Schindler's List, Günter Grass's Show Your Tongue, and Marguerite Duras's The Lover, to account for the ... Read more

In the following essay, Monk traces the progress of Halloren's apotheosis in Bring Larks and Heroes as a function of the narrative's inversion of conventional and pastoral tropes, relate... Read more

In the following essay, English examines the subjective bases of the authorial consciousness that informs Keneally's novels, emphasizing specifically the textual connections between his own bio... Read more

In the following review, Swickfaults The Place Where Souls are Born for its "confused mosiac" of Native American history and for Keneally's dependence on secondary sources. Here i... Read more

In the following review of Woman of the Inner Sea, Rifkind focuses on the characterization of the book's heroine. Australia, like America, was built on the promise of reinvention. Live here, it... Read more