Reimagining Australia: reading the nation in literature after 2007

This thesis analyses eleven works of contemporary Australian literature published between 2007 and 2018. I position these works as part of a resurgent literary multiculturalism emerging over the past decade or so. These texts give voice to migrants and asylum seekers, examine multiculturalism’s inherent tensions, interrogate xenophobic stereotypes, and question the ongoing presence of settlers on Indigenous lands. I borrow the concept of the “state-of-the-nation” text from British and US literary studies to analyse how these writers construct representations of contemporary Australia that are assertive and provocative, opening space to challenge and resist a dominant discourse based on settler-colonial subjectivity.