Wright’s Poetic Prose Epic

Abstract

While G.S. Fraser sees good free verse as “verse which does not scan regularly but seems always on the verge of scanning regularly” (1970, 74), I argue that Alexis Wright’s epic prose in Carpentaria sounds as if it were verging on poetry from the English tradition, blended with a local Indigenous oral tradition and Waanyi language. Using structuring devices occasionally borrowed from the English poetic tradition as well as from Waanyi, her prose achieves mnemonic functions, inscribing the novel as a memorial epic in a new epic diction, and glorifying the act of writing, as well as the use of orality.