A haunted land

Since the nineteenth century, Australian art and writing has had a double vision of the country; as a sunny land of opportunity, and as a place of loneliness and loss. From the diminutive figures of Glover’s Aborigines in their sylvan setting to the weird bush and lonely bushmen of Clarke, McCubbin, Kendall and Lawson, the land is melancholy. Yet Leigh Astbury has shown that this settler view of the land is the product of selective vision influenced by English and American ideas of the exotic and the picaresque. It emphasised the lonely prospector or swagman rather than the miners and unionists and their powerful, if ultimately defeated, unions. The idea of sturdy independence, of “freedom on the wallaby”, appealed to town-dwellers hoping to own their own homes at least as much as to bushwomen lining their rough huts with pictures from the Ladies Home Journal. As Brian Kiernan suggests, Lawson’s early stories found their readership among people forced off the land and into the suburbs and slums of Sydney by the defeats of the 1890s. Recent fiction by white writers has, like Lawson, shown an awareness of the strangeness of the land, but it locates this strangeness more directly in the brutality and defeats of settlement. The sufferings of both settlers and of those they violently displaced continue to haunt their successors. This paper will examine the nature of this haunting in recent novels by white Australian writers

FINDING FAITH IN FANTASY: EXPLORING THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, HARRY POTTER, AND HIS DARK MATERIALS

Fantasy is often a controversial topic within the Christian community, especially when magic is involved and religious ideals are tested. This controversy is explored and questioned through the advocating of the creative, intellectual, and spiritual qualities of Fantasy that are positive and encouraging for a Christian, and by analyzing the presence and value of these qualities within three famous fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, and His Dark Materials

The Child’s Voyage and the \u3ci\u3eImmram\u3c/i\u3e Tradition in Lewis, Tolkien, and Pullman

C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Philip Pullman have all written children’s fantasies derived from the medieval Irish immram, or voyage tale, best known from the voyage tales of the Irish figures, Saint Brendan and Mael Duin. William Flint Thrall defined the immram as “a sea-voyage tale in which a hero, accompanied by a few companions, wanders about from island to island, meets Otherworld wonders everywhere, and finally returns to his native land. In Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), Lucy and Edmund Pevensie are joined by their ill-mannered cousin Eustace on a voyage to a number of marvelous islands in the Narnian ocean. In Tolkien’s Roverandom (1998), an ill-mannered puppy named Rover is sent on a voyage to the moon and the Deep Blue Sea. In Pullman’s The Book of Dust, Volume One: La Belle Sauvage (2017), two children, Malcolm and Alice, rescue the baby Lyra from the those who wish to control her. In a wild voyage down the flooded River Thames, they encounter a number of strange islands. But these stories are more than exciting adventure tales. The voyage also serves as a metaphor for the soul’s moral testing. Thomas Owen Clancy describes the immram as “the saving of souls which use a voyage on the sea as the means of redemption.” Eustace is transformed, literally and spiritually, and is redeemed in the course of his voyage. Likewise, Tolkien’s Rover is transformed, literally and spiritually, and is redeemed. It is presumed that Pullman’s Lyra is transformed by drinking fairy-milk (although the effects of this will not be seen until after the events of this novel). It is primarily Malcolm, however, who faces the moral challenges in Pullman\u27s book. Yet, unlike Lewis and Tolkien, who write through a Christian lens, Pullman’s agnostic/atheistic lens is not concerned with spiritual redemption, but, rather, with right action. Malcolm, in his particular circumstances, performs the right action to protect Lyra and Alice, and he is subsequently rewarded with a place at Jordan College, Pullman’s analog of an earthly paradise. All three authors use the medieval immram structure and motifs to tell tales of transformation and personal growth. Lewis and Tolkien maintain the form’s original purpose of depicting Christian redemption stories. Pullman inverts several of the genre’s stock episodes and motifs, and thus subverts the immram’s original purpose, opting instead to depict a story of acting to save lives in the earthly realm

From Popular Culture to Popular Custom, and Back Again : A love-lock's tale

Walk over a major bridge in a Western city and chances are you will come across at least one or two love-locks. These are padlocks inscribed with names or initials and attached to a public structure, typically by a couple in declaration of romantic commitment, who then proceed to throw the key into the river below. Some assemblages of these love tokens are modest; others number the thousands. This has become a truly global phenomenon, with over 400 love-lock assemblages catalogued across 62 countries in all continents bar Antarctica: popular custom in the true sense of the term. Although this custom was practised prior to the 21st century, with evidence of it in Serbia and Hungary in the 1900s,i it did not gain widespread popularity until the mid-2000s — sparked, this paper contends, by an Italian teenage romance novel. This paper explores the transition from popular culture, defined here as mass-produced cultural products — including but not limited to television, film, literature and music — accessible to and consumed by the majority of a given society, to popular (or folk) custom. It also explores the reverse. As the love-lock custom gained popularity and familiarity, it became an established folk motif in films, television, and novels — from popular custom to popular culture — and this paper considers what these transitions demonstrate about the relationship, or interrelationship, between popular custom and popular culture.Peer reviewe

Spectrum, 2006

Literary journalhttps://nwcommons.nwciowa.edu/spectrum/1032/thumbnail.jp

Something, nothing : space, substance, and sexual identity in Shakespeare

This paper argues that early, "preoedipal" anxieties about dependency, autonomy, the boundaries of the self, the dangerous interpenetration of inner and outer worlds--the outer world contaminating the inner self, the self afraid of losing the precious "substance" that keeps it alive--play a significant role in Shakespeare's plays, specifically Hamlet and King Lear. It argues further that childhood dependence on a mother influences later feelings about the opposite sex and sexual conflicts revive early anxieties about autonomy and independence, so that the attempt to establish a proper balance between inner and outer worlds is inextricably tied (in the plays) to conceptions of sexual identity. In broader social terms, these plays reflect the problem of being (1) a separate, self-conscious individual at a time when the old values of an ordered, hierar"chical society were giving way to a new, middle-class, Protestant ethic of "individualism" and (2) a man at a time when sexual roles were becoming polarized in new ways. As the plays themselves imply--and as the paper tries to show--we can't understand the dilemmas of modern "individualism" without understanding the sexual parameters (learned in early childhood, reinforced by social experience) in terms of which these dilenrnas are lived out