His natural life
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
His natural life
(The world's classics)
Oxford University Press, 1997
- : pbk
Available at 3 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Originally published, 1874
Includes bibliographical references (p. [xxxix]-xl)
Description and Table of Contents
Description
"It is impossible to convey, in words, any idea of the hideous phatasmagoria of shifting limbs and faces which moved throught the evil-smelling twilight of this terrible prison-house. Callot might have drawn it, Dante might have suggested it, but a minute attempt to describe its horrors would but disgust. There are depths in humanity which one cannot explore, as there are mephitic caverns into which one dare not penetrate." Many critics were indeed "disgusted" by the horrors that Marcus Clarke revealed in "His Natural Life". So powerful was his representation of the brutality of transportation that more than a century later historians still struggle to disentangle fact from Clarke's tragic fiction. The novel charts the misfortunes of Richard Devine, falsely accused of murder, through the worse Australian penal settlements, the notorious Macquarie Harbour, Port Arthur, and Norfolk Island, retaining his humanity and spiritual dignity through all the degradations that cruelty and inhumanity could devise.
Clarke's novel is indeed a phantasmagoria of horrors - of murder, mutiny, flogging, child suicide, homosexual rape and cannibalism; yet it is also a powerful story of moral courage and heroic resistance to dehumanization. "His Natural Life" , usually published as "For the Term of His Natural Life" but here restored to the title Clarke gave it, is the grand epic of the transportation system, and has been described as the greatest 19th-century Australian novel. This edition returns to the text Clarke himself prepared for the first single-volume version, published in Melbourne in 1874.
by "Nielsen BookData"