'Comparing nineteenth-century British and Australian Anglo-Saxonist literature enables a “decentered” exploration of Anglo-Saxonism’s intersections with national, imperial, and colonial discourses, challenging assumptions that this discourse was an uncritical vehicle of English nationalism and British manifest destiny. Far from reflecting a stable imperial center, evocations of “ancient Englishness” in British literature were polyvalent and self-contesting, while in Australian literature they offered a response to colonization and emerging knowledge about the vast age of Indigenous Australian cultures.' (Authors abstract)
That Shining Band : A Study of Australian Colonial Verse Tradition
St Lucia
:
University of Queensland Press
,
1994
Z463297
1994
single work
criticism
Rejecting the apparently common perception that Australia's national identity was first expressed in verse by the balladists of the 1890s, Ackland explores the thematic developments of early colonial poets, both men and women, whose place in Australia's literary history he believes to have been largely undervalued.
