Details
Guest presenter:
Louise D'Arcens, School of English Literatures
and Philosophy, University of Wollongong, NSW
Lecture Title:
'Reception, Recovery, Recreation: The Singular
Story of the Middle Ages in Australia'
Time and Date:
6.00pm on Thursday 16th August 2012
Venue:
Gentilli Lecture Theatre (Geography 1.31), 1st Floor, Geography
Building, UWA
Abstract:
This talk will explore the varied, surprising, and
persistent afterlife of the Middle Ages in Australian culture. As
the late eighteenth century was the foundational period of British
settlement in the Australian colonies, High Enlightenment ideals
have had an indisputable impact on Australian public life. Yet the
story is not so simple. A growing recognition of the greater
complexity of colonial Australia's relationship with the European
past has led to a more nuanced account of its distinctive
engagement with a cultural legacy stretching back to the medieval
period. A picture is now emerging of a colonial culture in which
medievalism - the creative modern response to the Middle Ages and
adaptation of medieval concepts - has existed as a major aesthetic
and cultural presence in Australian literature, architecture,
political ceremony, theatre,art, and even sport. This thriving but
often unacknowledged subculture, with its preoccupations with
either romance and chivalry and folklore, or irrationality,
disorder, and Gothic gloom, has been far more formative of settler
Australia's cultural identity than has been recognized. Looking at
examples from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this
talk will explore just some of the large body of medievalism
Australia has produced, and will discuss some of the ways we can
understand its highly localized interpretations of medieval motifs,
narrative forms, legends, and personages.
About the speaker:
Louise D'Arcens is the author of Old Songs In The Timeless
Land: Medievalism In Australian Literature 1840-1910 (Brepols/UWA
Publishing, 2012). She is an Associate Investigator in CHE and has
recently been awarded an ARC Future Fellowship for her project
'Comic medievalism and the modern world'. She will be a plenary
speaker at the CMEMS/PMRG Conference, August 17-18.
