Michael D. Butler

My connected narrative or autobiographical memory started up in a small, isolated town sitting on the line exactly between desert to the east and mountain forest to the west; afterward I led a very nomadic childhood and youth which ranged through all regions in the nation and to some outside.   Probably because of that, I have always been interested in how questions of identity and belonging play out and are mapped in literature and language.  That led to my early specialization in 19th-century American literature as well as my studies in historical narrative, regional writing, and popular literature.  I’m now studying the same subjects in Australian literature, focusing my research particularly on the contemporary experiments in diverse forms of historical narrative by writers who seek to address a troublesome past and remap or rewrite it as well as the people and places of Australia—writers like Peter Carey, Kate Grenville, Richard Flanagan, Richard King, Gail Jones, Matthew Condon, Delia Falconer, and, especially, Alexis Wright.