The Transnational Fantasy: The Case of James Cowan

Abstract

Matthews talks about James Cowan's most famous Novel, A Mapmaker's Dream (1996) which his work as a whole has received little critical attention in the broader context of Australian literature. Cowan's best-known writings are cosmopolitan in scope: A Mapmaker's Dream, for instance, is the fictional diary of Fra Mauro, a historical figure that Cowan plucks from the Renaissance to serve as a postmodern meditation on the advent of both colonialism and modernity, while A Troubadour's Testament (1998) relates the quest of a twentieth-century British academic to discover the secrets of the medieval French troubadour and poet Marcebru.