Louise D’Arcens,
Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840-1910
Turnhout, Brepols, 2011.
An absorbing account by a leading Australian medievalist of
one of the undernoticed foundations of Australian culture and identity.
D’Arcens shows that late nineteenth century novelists, especially women
writers, were acutely aware of the medievalism of the pre-Raphaelites and the
William Morris circle, and read these formations both as searching critiques of modern materialism,
and also as a set of ideas and practices capable of collapsing into mere
fashion. D’Arcens has also researched poetry – the work of Adam Lindsay Gordon
is richly medieval, as he identified with the hard-riding heroes of the border
ballads, including his namesake and, he claimed, relative Edom o’ Gordon.
Perhaps the most unusual element of the book is the work
done on popular literature and especially theatre: everything appeared on the
stage, often in magnificently elaborate settings, and the full panoply of
medievalism occupied the theatre, and also appears in cartoons and other
popular treatments. But underlying the book, and addressed directly in the
Introduction and elsewhere, is the element to which medievalism for some
Australians justified the seizure of the country and the subsequent treatment
of the native people: some Australians felt they were like Saxons, Vikings and
Normans, taking what they liked through the virtue – and by implication the
validity – of their physical power.
This is a book to interest and entertain the intelligent
general reader as well as the serious student, but also one that poses some
searching questions about the bases and ideologies of white Australian culture.
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