Old Songs in the Timeless Land
Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840-1910
By (author) Louise D'Arcens
This volume is the first close examination of the rich and diverse body of medievalist texts produced in late colonial and early Federal (ie post-1901) Australia. It examines the many ways in which early Australian novelists, poets, and dramatists drew on the motifs, events, and personages of the medieval past, and places particular emphasis on how they used the European past to illuminate their sense of the Australian present. Broadly stated, the book argues that a study of early Australian medievalist literature and theatre uncovers a rich and revealing drama in which the forces of cultural nostalgia and cultural amnesia sometimes contended against one another, and sometimes harmonised, to produce a unique and distinctive corpus. The book significantly extends current knowledge about nineteenth-century literary and theatrical medievalism by offering an exploration of how medievalist discourses and idioms came to be taken up within a major, but as yet under-examined, branch of Anglophone literature. It aims also to broaden the cultural ambit of nineteenth-century medievalism by offering analyses of popular and ephemeral instances alongside more ‘serious’ medievalist texts. The study balances an interest in how this medievalism responded to local conditions with an interest in its international complexion, examining how Australian medievalist novels, poems, and plays, participated in imperial and transpacific intellectual and entertainment circuits.While the emphasis of the volume is on close, historically-contextualising interpretations of texts, it has woven through its arguments a series of meditations on such theoretical matters as how we determine the boundaries of medievalism, how we might develop an account of colonial medievalism as non-derivative, whether medievalist discourses are equally amenable across gender, class, and ideological lines, and how the premodern past is evoked as a means for formulating the present and the future. Louise D’Arcens is an Associate Professor in the English Literatures Program. Her two main current research areas are medievalism and medieval women’s writing.
- By (author) Louise D’Arcens
Other Titles in this Series
Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology
A History of Reception and an Annotated Bibliography of Studies, 1798-1948
Volume 3
Similar Books
A Late Antique Harrowing of Hell and Its Medieval Reception
Eusebius of Alexandria's Sermons 15 and 17 (CPG 5524; 5526) and their Latin Rewritings
Volume 99
Behind the Scenes of Medieval Roofs
An Overview of the Roofing Systems of Italian Churches
Volume 90
Innovation and Medieval Communities
The Circulation of Ideas and Practices in and out of the Town (1200-1500)
Volume 63
Linguistic and Cultural Dynamics in a Frontier Society
New Perspectives on Northeastern Bavaria and Western Bohemia in the Early Middle Ages
Volume 9
Medieval Debates on Foreknowledge: Future Contingents, Prophecy, and Divination
Acts of the XXVII Annual Colloquium of the SIEPM, Trento 12-15 September 2023
Volume 31
Medieval Yeghegis, Armenia
History, Archaeology, Society. Local Multiplicities and Global Connections of a Rural Centre on the Silk Road(s)
