Abstract EN:

The present study aims to demonstrate how the notion of innocence, which is articulated in a fundamentally dynamic way and inseparably linked with its opposites, plays a crucial role in the literary works of two contemporary Australian novelists, Robert Drewe and Tim Winton, who have mostly used Western Australia as the geographic, historical and cultural backdrop for their novels. These two examples will allow more generally to study the mutations of the Judeo-Christian notion of original innocence and the correlated notions –of Fall / responsibility / maturity / corruption / guilt / salvation / redemption / grace– which were imported from Europe in these Southern lands and gradually adapted to the environmental and human otherness of these territories, thus spiritually reinvested at the expense of the existing indigenous cosmogony. The study shall show how both authors depict this symbolic as well as concrete appropriation of the local reality through classical symbols gradually acclimated to the character of the colonial and postcolonial experience of this antipodal environment: Edenic perfection followed by the original sin and a limbo of atonement, reformulation of the dream of the origins as a bucolic and Georgic golden age in the cultural history of the Antiquity and the Renaissance, voluntary escape from a passive condition through a Promethean revolt, the first ages of mankind reconceptualized by Hobbes and Rousseau). The analysis of Drewe’s and Winton’s novels will underline the uniqueness of individual and collective journeys, from lost innocence to the possibility of a psychological and spiritual return to grace.