Remembering Babylon
London
Milsons Point
:
Chatto and Windus
Random House
,
1993
Z452447
1993
single work
novel
historical fiction
(taught in 48 units)
'In the mid-1840s, a thirteen-year-old boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by Aborigines. Sixteen years later, when settlers reach the area, he moves back into the world of Europeans, men and women who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place, hopeful and yet terrified of what it might do to them.
Given shelter by the McIvors, the family of the children who originally made contact with him, Gemmy seems at first to be guaranteed a secure role in the settlement, but there are currents of fear and mistrust in the air. To everyone he meets - from George Abbot, the romantically aspiring young teacher, to Mr Frazer, the minister, whose days are spent with Gemmy recording the local flora; from Janet McIvor, just coming to adulthood and discovering new versions of the world, to the eccentric Governor of Queensland himself - Gemmy stands as a different kind of challenge, as a force which both fascinates and repels. And Gemmy himself finds his own whiteness as unsettling in this new world as the knowledge he brings with him of the savage, the Aboriginal.' - Publisher's blurb (Chatto & Windus, 1993).
Mathilda in The Mary Shelley Reader, B T Bennett, et al, eds (OUP).
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in Complete Poems, W Blake (Penguin).
Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings, T DeQuincey (OUP).
Liber Amoris in Selected Writings, W Hazlitt (Penguin).
'Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?', in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, J F Lyotard (U of Minnesota P).
The White Hotel, D M Thomas (Penguin).
The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, D Wordsworth (OUP).
The Pedlar, Tintern Abbey, the Two-Part Prelude, W Wordsworth (Cambridge).
This subject offers an introduction to romanticism as a paradigmatic discourse of modernity, with particular emphasis on questions of gender, aesthetics and subjectivity. It also examines aspects of the role played by the ideology and discourse of romanticism in contemporary culture, with particular reference to the sublime and sexuality. Students who successfully complete this subject will be familiar with some of the key concepts and tropes of romanticism, have a broad understanding of the relation between romanticism and modernity, and understand some of the roles played by romanticism in contemporary culture.
