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.
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