Martin Boyd: the aesthetic temperament : a critical study

The claim of this thesis is that Martin Boyd is a writer of aesthetic inclination whose fundamental concerns and values, while they emerge in a highly individual manner and with the complicating orientation of a religious view of the world, have clear affinities with the fin de siecle celebration of beauty and pleasure as the goal of life. Section I concentrates on the milieu into which the novelist was born, its aim being to investigate the presence of late Victorian ideas in this environment. Attention is given to the role of the a Beckett- Boyd family as a shaping force in the novelist's formative background, with particular emphasis on the cultural interests of Boyd's own parents, painters associated with the flowering in Australia of an art that has been labelled 'Impressionist.' Both the European and Australian nineties are considered for their alternative and, at times, complementary contributions to the general cultural atmosphere affecting the novelist's upbringing. The part played by Boyd's schooling is also considered. Section II examines Boyd's theoretical notions as these are developed in a discursive work of the writer's mature years, Much Else in Italy, A Subjective Travel Book. The idea of the primacy of beauty, a central concept in nineteenth-century aestheticism, is revealed as vital to Boyd's exploration of the marriage of Classicism and Christianity in Western civilization. In this way his vision is linked with the Hellenizing impulse of the late Victorian imagination. Section III, comprising chapters three to seven, sets out to show that the aesthetic view of life, expressing itself as a vision of pleasure, dominated the novelist's imagination from the outset and continued as a major preoccupation of his fiction. Chapter three discusses the lesser fiction, where a theme of pleasure is often mechanically presented. Chapters four, five and six analyse its more sophisticated treatment in the better fiction: The Montforts, Lucinda Brayford and the Langton novels. In the case of the Langton books, my concern is with The Cardboard Crown and Outbreak of Love as the two novels in the series most preoccupied with evoking those aspects of life which reveal themselves as 'the face of pleasure.' In these novels Boyd concentrates on what he terms 'the Greek story' in his portrayal of a number of searching individuals who are afforded at least a partial experience of a life of beauty and enjoyment. Chapter seven is a transitional chapter discussing the system of values underlying Boyd's division of his characters into the categories of aesthetes and puritans. The idea of a spiritual contest focuses Boyd's need to reconcile his vision of a life of pleasure with his awareness of moral evil and initiates a discussion of his approach to the graver issues of life. Section IV, comprising chapters eight to ten, discusses the treatment of the suffering hero in four novels, Lucinda Brayford, Such Pleasure, A Difficult Young Man and When Blackbirds Sing, in which Boyd seeks to portray a transcending of the aesthetic vision and to offer a view of life able to give a positive interpretation to the fact of pain and sorrow. A variety of approaches is revealed: the rather abstract provision of the framework of Christian myth in the story of Stephen Brayford, the discursive argument of Such Pleasure, the entirely aesthetic evocation of 'the face of sorrow' in A Difficult Young Man, and, finally, the presentation in When Blackbirds Sing of a double world, the symbol of a personality divided against itself. In each case, we witness the novelist's search for a resolution to the apparent conflict between the pleasure-loving personality's desire for fulfilment and his knowledge of evil. Significantly, the values important to Boyd's aesthete characters are not rejected but are gathered up in the appreciation of a higher kind of moral beauty, that of sacrificial love. Section V discusses Boyd's aesthetic impulse from the point of view of a technique of Impressionism he shares with a number of other writers and which, in his case, owes something to his background of a family of painters. The early novels are examined for elements which anticipate major developments in the mature fiction. The implications of an Impressionist approach for the form of the novel - its handling of narrative, plot and character - are considered in detail. An Appendix is included with the aim of highlighting both fin de siecle and Impressionist developments in Australian art at the turn of the century

Rock art animals in profile: Visual recognition and the principles of canonical form

The article examines factors involved in rapid and easy visual identification of animals in life and art. It gives an account of what we term canonical form in connection with 'basic level' recognition, profile depiction and the concept of salience. In t

Canonical Figures and the Recognition of Animals in Life and Art

Is there a particular perceptual modality, i.e., a way of seeing rock art figures (zoomorphs and anthropomorphs) which involves simple recognition and is distinguishable from the recognition of these same figures in other contexts? Such a modality would be prioritized by evolution and would depend on elements of a figure and/or of perception which make preliminary identification easy and rapid, for example, typical or dominant views, salient features, pars pro toto processes, visual "invariants" (Gibson 1979), "typical contours" (Deregowski 1984, 1995). This paper discusses some of the literature on the subject and offers its own perspective on what we term canonicals in life and in art

Vasari, Schapiro, Schaafsma: Three Points of Departure for a Discussion of Style in Rock Art

This article examines the concept of style by combining three approaches: that of Giorgio Vasari, whose work is a classic of Western art history, that of Meyer Schapiro, which mediates between art-historical and archaeological/anthropological disciplines, and that of Polly Schaafsma, an example of what stylistic analysis may achieve in rock art studies. We foreground rock art by reason of its ubiquity and time-depth, at the same time placing it in the context of any kind of depiction. In the course of the argument, we comment on a variety of relevant issues, such as those relating to progress in art; to realism; to the relation of style and history, that is, cultural context; and to quantitative as well as qualitative analytical methodologies

Deception Creek: An Architectural Petroglyph Site in South Australia

The "turn to landscape" in recent archaeological studies supports an approach to petroglyph images as functioning to define and enhance features of the rock formations that support them. This is seen at Red Gorge in the northern Flinders Ranges, South Australia, where human adaptation of the naturally-built environment discloses proto-architectural attributes of cliffs on Deception Creek. In a particular instance, focus on the placement of images on specific surfaces (the walls and floor of a passageway) opens the question of what it is we might call a site. The discussion of "Panaramitee" claims is relevant to current inquiry into Australian Pleistocene art

Fossil Fever: Early Australian rock art studies in historical context

Commentaries by Basedow (1914) and by Mountford and Edwards (1964) on the northern Flinders Ranges sites of Deception Creek East and Red Gorge hold a special place in the history of thinking about the character of Australian rock art. This paper revisits their field observations in order to investigate the ways in which initial questions and speculations relating to the age of the petroglyphs have influenced enquiry and continue to drive efforts to establish a time-frame for rock art in this region and beyond

The Case for Hand Stencils and Prints as Proprio-Performative

Hand stencils and prints are found globally in rock art, reflecting the sine qua non role of the hand in human evolution. The body itself is the tool, and it affords the registering, in the form of a trace, of what perceptual psychology terms an “ecological self”. More than a “signature”, a hand mark is uniquely “proprio-performative”, combining inscription of individuality with direct address. The first part of this paper looks at what might get in the way of a universally readable primary meaning by methodically addressing issues of technique and cultural specificity. Having cleared the ground, it proceeds to make its argument for hand stencils and prints as constituting a special category of rock art imagery. It does this by having recourse to ideas currently under discussion in cognitive psychology: awareness of self-agency and body-ownership, as well as the notion of perceived looming in pictures. Finally, an appeal is made to the claim for a key mirror neuron role in communication. Because they are traces of actions eliciting mirror-neuronal responses, hand marks are seen as affording a readily accessible external term in an exchange of meaning on which a system of graphic communication might be built

Hand Traces: Technical Aspects of Positive and Negative Hand-Marking in Rock Art

Affordances necessary for the making of hand traces in the form of stencils and prints—primarily the availability of pigment and a suitable surface—bear on our understanding of their emergence as early exograms. Matters relating to the question of how pigment was/is applied, the placement and embellishment of images, the procurement and preparation of ochre, and the selecting and priming of surfaces, are discussed here—as well as the intriguing occurrence of variant hands. Advantage is taken of Australia’s position as a zone of ongoing hand-marking practice to suggest what can be learned from ethnography. Finally, avenues for future research are proposed with a view to opening out a discussion of external information storage possibilities in relation to hand traces