IMC 2008: Sessions
Session 1207: Medievalism and Australian Environmental Imagination
Wednesday 9 July 2008, 14.15-15.45
Sponsor: | Australasian Medievalisms Cluster, ARC Network for Early European Research |
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Organiser: | Andrew Lynch, Department of English & Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia |
Moderator/Chair: | Andrew Lynch, Department of English & Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia |
Paper 1207-a | Staging Medieval Environments in 'Marvellous Melbourne' (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Comparative, Medievalism and Antiquarianism |
Paper 1207-b | Medieval Australian Animals?: A Bestiary and a Beast Fable (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Comparative, Medievalism and Antiquarianism |
Paper 1207-c | Magical Ecosystems: Medievalism and the Transformations of Genre in Australian Fantasy Fiction (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Comparative, Medievalism and Antiquarianism |
Abstract | This session addresses the influence of medievalism on Australian cultural imaginations of the environment, from colonial times to the present: 1860s Melbourne offered a moment in which aesthetic tastes, public events, and urban development converged to make medievalism an unexpected yet appropriate idiom to express civic identity. The poetry of Les Murray and Francis Webb aligns medieval bestiaries and beast fables with Aboriginal totemism to blur the boundaries of the spiritual and the natural, questioning the ascendancy of human wisdom. In contemporary Australia genre fantasy fiction, a sense of oneness with the land is problematically based on both medievalist supernaturalism and the claim to cultural ownership through a 'blood' tie. |