Title: "Tell Us, Irma, Tell Us:" (Re)fashioning neo-Victorian memory in Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967)
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2021, vol. 47, iss. 1, pp. 255-273
Extent
255-273
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2021-1-14
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/144304
Type: Article
Language
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
Neo-Victorian literature has drawn a great deal of attention in the past forty years due to its tantalizing ways of negotiating the interplay between history, memory, trauma and nostalgia. Even though Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) partakes in many of the issues that characterize neo-Victorian aesthetics, it has hardly been examined under the critical light of neo-Victorianism. The argument of the article assumes that the (re)presentation, scrutiny and (re)enactment of Victorian culture in the novel defies or at least transcends received readings of Victorian culture and engages in an active, yet permanent search for memory as fiction, the re-enactment of the past as a revealing dimension of the present and, last, but not least, a permanent negotiation with / of nostalgia as a creative and transformative force. The analysis will help interpret Lindsay’s novel as an archetypal neo-Victorian novel, arguably a foundational one.
References
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[32] Widder, Nathan (2010) Time is out of joint – and so are we: Deleuzean immanence and the fractured self. Philosophy Today 50 (4), 405–417. | DOI 10.5840/philtoday200650427
[33] Wild, Harriet (2014) Darling Miranda: Courtly love in Picnic at Hanging Rock. Studies in Australasian Cinema 8 (2), 123–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/17503175.2014.960681. | DOI 10.1080/17503175.2014.960681
[34] Williams, James (2011) Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
[2] Armellino, Pablo (2009) Ob-scene Spaces in Australian Narrative: An Account of the Socio-topographic Construction of Space in Australian Literature. Stuttgart: Verlag.
[3] Bladen, Victoria (2012) The rock and the void: Pastoral and loss in Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock and Peter Weir's film adaptation. Colloquy 23, 159–184.
[4] Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine and Gruss, Susanne (2010) Introduction. In: Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine and Gruss, Susanne (eds.) Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations. London and New York: Routledge, 1–17.
[5] Chalupský, Petr (2020) Non-normative Victorians: Ian Maguire's The North Water as a neo-Victorian novel. Brno Studies in English 46(2), 103–118. https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2020-2-6. | DOI 10.5817/BSE2020-2-6
[6] Crick, Malcolm (1985) Corsets, culture and contingency: Reflections on Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock. Mankind 15 (3), 231–242.
[7] De Bolle, Leen (2010) Deleuze's passive synthesis of time and the dissolved self. In: De Bolle, Leen (ed.) Deleuze and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Essays on Deleuze's Debate with Psychoanalysis. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 131–156.
[8] Deleuze, Gilles (2013 [1968]) Difference and Repetition. Paul Patton, trans. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
[9] Haltof, Marek (1996) The spirit of Australia in Picnic at Hanging Rock: A case study in film adaptation. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 23 (3), 809–822.
[10] Heilmann, Ann and Llewellyn, Mark (2010) Neo-Victorianism. The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
[11] Ho, Elizabeth (2010) The neo-Victorian at sea: Towards a global memory of the Victorian. In: Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine and Gruss, Susanne (eds.) Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations. London and New York: Routledge, 165–178.
[12] Holmqvist, Jytte (2013) Contrasting cultural landscapes and spaces in Peter Weir's film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), based on Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel with the same title. Coolabah 11, 25–35. https://doi.org/10.1344/co20131125-35. | DOI 10.1344/co20131125-35
[13] Hulbert, Adam (2016) The precarity of the inarticulate: Two kinds of silence in Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock. Philament 22, 27–55.
[14] Jameson, Frederic (2003) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
[15] Kaplan, Cora (2007) Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press.
[16] Karl, Rosa (2010) Participatory desires: On metalepsis, immersion and the re-plotting of the Victorian. In: Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine and Gruss, Susanne (eds.) Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations. London and New York: Routledge, 38–50.
[17] Kirkby, Joan (1978) Old orders, new lands: The earth spirit in Picnic at Hanging Rock. Australian Literary Studies 8 (3), 248–270.
[18] Kohlke, Marie-Luise (2010) Mining the neo-Victorian vein: Prospecting for gold, buried treasure and uncertain metal. In: Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine and Gruss, Susanne (eds.) Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations. London and New York: Routledge, 21–37.
[19] Lindsay, Joan (2009 [1967]) Picnic at Hanging Rock. London and New York: Vintage.
[20] Matthews, Samantha (2010) Remembering the Victorians. In: O'Gorman, Francis (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture. Cambridge: CUP, 275–282.
[21] Mayr, Suzette (2017) "Misfit" college: The sentient house as thing in Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock. Antipodes 31 (2), 393–406. https://doi.org/10.13110/antipodes.31.2.0393. | DOI 10.13110/antipodes.31.2.0393
[22] McCarthy, Claire (2018) Adaptations down under: Reading national identity through the lens of adaptation studies. In: Cutchins, Dennis, Krebs, Katja and Voigts, Eckart (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Adaptation. London and New York: Routledge, 217–231.
[23] McFarlane, Brian (1983) Words and Images. Australian Novels into Film. Melbourne: Heinemann.
[24] Mitchell, Kate (2010) History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
[25] Rousseau, Yves (1987) Commentary on Chapter Eighteen. In: Taylor, John (ed.) The Secret of Hanging Rock. Sydney: ETT Imprint. E-book.
[26] Steele, Kathleen (2010) Fear and loathing in the Australian bush: Gothic landscapes in Bush Studies and Picnic at Hanging Rock. Colloquy 20, 33–56.
[27] Taylor, John (1987) The invisible foundation stone. In: Taylor, John (ed.) The Secret of Hanging Rock. Sydney: ETT Imprint. E-book.
[28] Thomas, Ronald R (2000) Specters of the novel: Dracula and the cinematic afterlife of the Victorian novel. In: Kucich, John and Sadoff, Dianne (eds.) Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press, 288–310.
[29] Tilley, Elspeth (2009) The uses of fear: Spatial politics in the Australian white-vanishing trope. Antipodes 23 (1), 33–41.
[30] Tilley, Elspeth (2012) White Vanishing: Rethinking Australia's Lost-in-the-bush Myth. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
[31] Valls Oyarzun, Eduardo (2017) Dueños del Tiempo y del Espanto: Genealogía Nietzscheana de la Responsabilidad en la Narrativa Victoriana. Madrid: Escolar y Mayo.
[32] Widder, Nathan (2010) Time is out of joint – and so are we: Deleuzean immanence and the fractured self. Philosophy Today 50 (4), 405–417. | DOI 10.5840/philtoday200650427
[33] Wild, Harriet (2014) Darling Miranda: Courtly love in Picnic at Hanging Rock. Studies in Australasian Cinema 8 (2), 123–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/17503175.2014.960681. | DOI 10.1080/17503175.2014.960681
[34] Williams, James (2011) Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.