Fantastic Tropes and Indigenous Female Gothic in Alexis Wright's 'The Swan Book'

The Swan Book (2013) by Aboriginal author Alexis Wright is a speculative fiction novel with cultural, political, and ecocritical implications. Set in a dystopian future in which wars and climate change have destroyed the Western world, it tells the story of Oblivia Ethyl, a mute teenage Aboriginal girl who lives in a swampy area in northern Australia. Basing on Propp’s model for the study of the fairy tale and Todorov’s description of fantastic, I investigated The Swan Book from a genre fiction perspective. Wright draws on fantastic elements typical of fairy tales and gothic fiction to bring marginal stories forth from the silence and challenge the tyranny of single interpretations of fiction. In my article, I focussed on is how the author uses fantastic tropes and defamiliarises them to produce multiple levels of reality that puzzle the reader and make him face the limits of his cultural position.