Cirrus@Austlit

'Lynch's exploration of nineteenth-century Australian burlesque argues that while colonial Australia participated in a larger irreverent, comic culture of popular medievalism, its apparent irreverence toward the Middle Ages sometimes in fact belied a nagging sense that modern Australian public life could only be a base parody of an illustrious European past ('Medievalism, Nationalism, Colonialism', p.4)

'Peter Otto's essay ... argues that the novel's temporal frame, and its evocation of a species of Gothicism, challenges conventional periodisation' (p.4). The author argues that 'the space of engagement conjured by our ... slow reading of An Imaginary Life , offers an important allegory of the situation of white Australians. Read in these terms, it suggests just how important it might be for white Australians, temporarily, to resist the urge to belong, and that they might not want to become the 'final man', the 'white aborigine', that their own past has dreamed' (p.100).