The Relative Merits of Goodness and Originality: The Ethics of Storytelling in Peter Carey’s Novels

The aim of this Ph.D. thesis is to demonstrate that recurrent formal and thematic patterns in Peter Carey’s novels suggest an interrelation between the works, and that an analysis which takes that interrelation into account can extract an argument concerning the ethics of storytelling from the texts. The issue of the status of fictional discourse receives prominent and complex consideration in Carey’s novels, and this study argues that Carey presents storytelling as an intentional mode of social interaction, defined and governed by extra-linguistic conventions. For the discourse to be meaningfully described as fictional, storytellers as well as their audiences have to observe the rules that apply to their activity.