Issue Details: First known date: 1984... 1984 The Historical Novel: Jack Lindsay's `1649 : A Novel of a Year'
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In Fanfrolico and After Jack Lindsay discusses the historical novels he began to write in the mid 1930s. 'I still, however, could not handle the contemporary scene.'191 When contemporary society proves too resistant, then a recourse to history can be a way of approaching it from another direction, an approach to catch it off guard, unprotected. So it was in the mid-seventeenth century, both before the English Revolution and in the Restoration aftermath of repression, that poets turned to Old Testament themes: to search for a model that would illuminate the current complexities; and to evade the complex of repressions that effectively discouraged an accurate expression of the present moment. To turn to the historical is not to flee in escapism from the present, but to confront it by a negation that will allow a true perception of the negated present to emerge dialectically. The inexpressible crisis of the nineteen-thirties thus finds itself revealed in Lindsay's 1649: A Novel of A Year (1938);192 the emergent centralized, military-based, repressive Junto of Cromwell images the emergent dictatorships and national governments and the destruction of the radical impulses of cooperation and freedom at this moment in twentieth-century history.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Notes:
Minor title variations appear in texts
Last amended 23 May 2023 07:03:24
160-179 The Historical Novel: Jack Lindsay's `1649 : A Novel of a Year'small AustLit logo
134-159 The Historical Novel: Jack Lindsay's `1649 : A Novel of a Year'small AustLit logo
X