Parergon

In the British press, Australian colonial identity was one of family likeness, a position perpetuated throughout the Victorian age. In the Australian press, the burgeoning local literature began to shift away from this sense of the familial to develop a new kind of relationship and a new identity altogether. By 1910, Australia had progressed from its colonial beginnings as a far-flung penal colony of the British Empire to a newly found federated autonomous state. Although Australian publications in this period reveal a consciousness of the various literary genres and practices in British publishing, these were often altered and forged into a different, and therefore independent, shape. In so doing, Australian literature revealed a renegotiation of style and concept and ideology.

As a part of this renegotiation, Louise D’Arcens’s book takes just one major literary genre, Victorian medievalism, and explores ‘how Australian writers developed a body of medievalist literature that was responsive to, and formative of, the cultural landscape of colonial and early Federal Australia’ (p. 15). The result is an engaging and wide-ranging study of what might seem, at first glance, to be an unlikely topic. Under the rubric ‘Medievalism’, D’Arcens includes the Gothic, Historical Romance (Walter Scott’s novels in particular), the poetry of Tennyson, the Oxford Movement (Newman, Pugin), Pre-Raphaelitism, Orientalism, Aestheticism, Decadence, [End Page 162] and a ‘contemporary material medievalism’ (p. 66) as represented by William Morris and Company, and the arts and crafts movement. Victorian medievalism has been the basis of any number of in-depth studies, so that at one level its presence in a nascent Australian literature is not surprising and it is indeed, as she rightly points out, a ‘legacy of British colonialism’ (p. 3). Her work, however, reveals another level altogether, an argument, broadly speaking, in which medievalism becomes the vehicle with which to express the development of autonomous nationhood and which anticipates the separation of the colony from the mother country.

Each chapter is discrete in itself and for this reason the study does not offer a fully developed, over-arching, and particularised argument. Rather, D’Arcens takes very differing bodies of work and as case studies explores the ramifications of that broad argument noted above within very specific genres. Almost all of the material explored engages at varying depths with visions of, or meditations on, Australian’s future, in particular how that future will play out politically. Close readings of novelists Rolf Boldrewood and Joseph Furphy reveal a Walter-Scott-inherited Anglo-Saxonism, exploring how Australian medievalism focuses the gaze on race and class politics by adding an antipodean dimension. If Boldrewood ‘develops a vision of Australia’s future’ (p. 41), Furphy, more complexly, formulates ‘his views on the ideal form of social and political organisation for Australia’ (p. 45).

The second chapter addresses women novelists Rosa Praed, ‘Tasma’, Ada Cambridge, and Catherine Martin, engaging with the intersection of gender and culture, with their focus on the ‘Australian Girl’, a vigorous and outgoing young woman in telling contrast to middleclass British concepts of refined and constrained femininity. D’Arcens shows these novelists characterising a new and fit generation who will prove indispensable for the coming nation. As D’Arcens points out, their work ‘demonstrates medievalism’s capacity to function … as both common imperial currency and a reflection of the minutiae of antipodean colonial environments’ (p. 57).

At the centre of D’Arcens’s study, the third chapter offers a fascinating reappraisal of the poetry of Adam Lindsay Gordon to reveal what D’Arcens argues is Gordon’s ‘literary engagement with the Middle Ages’ adding that the medieval is ‘central to his sense of its unique, if unexpected, correspondence with modern Australia’ (p. 95). It is further claimed that Gordon’s medievalism ‘is central to his reputation’ (p. 101), but the ensuing discussion, while proving of real interest, is not entirely...