Thursday ~ 18 June, 7:00 PM US Eastern / Friday ~ 19 June, 9:00 AM Australian Eastern
DESCRIPTION: In this panel, we compare how Australian and American Romantic writers figured the frontier in their work. The Early Nineteenth Century was a period of great and terrible expansion in both Australia and the United States, as the colonists warred to wrest the land from its Indigenous inhabitants. These bloody conflicts are reflected in the aesthetic contradictions of literary works, which adapt Romantic literary conventions to represent or sublimate the violence. In the first paper, Hannah Murray describes the Australian reception of Robert Montgomery Bird’s virulent “Indian-hating novel,” Nick of the Woods (1837). Bird’s novel was adapted for the stage in 1838 by Louisa Medina, and performed in colonial Australia in the 1840s-70s. Decades later, newspapers the colonies serialised the novel, hoping that their readers “will thank us for exhuming it” (Weekly Times, 1892). Murray shows how Australian colonists used Bird’s novel to establish a shared settler-colonial vision extending across centuries and continents, which valorised violence, exoticised Indigenous people, and engendered sympathy for the settlers. In the second paper, Paul Eggert describes “the Cooper Effect” in Australian literature, discussing the powerful influence of James Fennimore Cooper on the emergent genre of the Aboriginal Lament in Australian poetry. He considers especially early examples of the Aboriginal Lament penned by Charles Harpur and Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, whose poems are more morally troubled and anxious than the stridently racist poems of later in the century. In the final paper, Michael Falk continues the discussion of Charles Harpur, comparing him to his older American contemporary, William Cullan Bryant. Both Harpur and Bryant were practitioners of pastoral elegy. They described deathly landscapes in order to explore and resolve their anxieties about the injustice of colonisation and about their own literary authority. While Harpur and Bryant both use the mode of pastoral elegy to sublimate colonial violence, they do so in strikingly different ways.
PARTICIPANTS:
Paul Eggert
Hannah Murray
Michael Falk