World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture (Oxford Textual Perspectives)

World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture explores the ways in which a range of modern textual cultures have continued to engage creatively with the medieval past in order to come to terms with the global present. Building its argument through four case studies--from the Middle East, France, Southeast Asia, and Indigenous Australia--it shows that to understand medievalism as a cultural idiom with global reach, we need to develop a more nuanced grasp of the different ways 'the Middle Ages' have come to signify beyond Europe as well as within a Europe that has been transformed by multiculturalism and the global economy. The book's case studies are explored within a conceptual framework in which medievalism itself is formulated as 'world-disclosing' a transhistorical encounter that enables the modern subject to apprehend the past 'world' opened up in medieval and medievalist texts and objects. The book analyses the cultural and material conditions under which its texts are produced, disseminated, and received, and examines literature alongside films, television programs, newspapers and journals, political tracts, as well as such material and artefactual texts as photographs, paintings, statues, buildings, rock art, and fossils. While the case studies feature distinctive localised forms of medievalism, taken together they reveal how imperial and global legacies have ensured that the medieval period continues to be perceived as a commonly held past that can be retrieved, reclaimed, or revived in response to the accelerated changes and uncertainties of global modernity. World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture explores the ways in which a range of modern textual cultures have continued to engage creatively with the medieval past in order to come to terms with the global present. Building its argument through four case studies—from the Middle East, France, Southeast Asia, and Indigenous Australia–it shows that to understand medievalism as a cultural idiom with global reach, we need to develop a more nuanced grasp of the different ways ‘the Middle Ages’ have come to signify beyond Europe as well as within a Europe that has been transformed by multiculturalism and the global economy. The book’s case studies are explored within a conceptual framework in which medievalism itself is formulated as ‘world-disclosing’—a transhistorical encounter that enables the modern subject to apprehend the past ‘world’ opened up in medieval and medievalist texts and objects. The book analyses the cultural and material conditions under which its texts are produced, disseminated, and received and examines literature alongside films, television programs, newspapers and journals, political tracts, as well as such material and artefactual texts as photographs, paintings, statues, buildings, rock art, and fossils. While the case studies feature distinctive localized forms of medievalism, taken together they reveal how imperial and global legacies have ensured that the medieval period continues to be perceived as a commonly held past that can be retrieved, reclaimed, or revived in response to the accelerated changes and uncertainties of global modernity. Cover 1 World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture 4 Copyright 5 Series Editor's Preface 6 Dedication 8 Preface and Acknowledgements 10 Contents 14 List of Figures 16 Introduction: Medievalism and the Missing Globe 18 The global Middle Ages 21 Globalism and medievalism 29 Globe and world 33 World Medievalism: the arrangementof this book 40 1: Medievalism Disoriented: The French Novel and Neo-reactionary Politics 52 Nation and ‘globophobia’ 52 Populism and the loss of ‘deep France’ 55 Jérôme Ferrari’s Sermon on the Fall of Rome:colonial trauma 63 Michel Houellebecq’s Submission: melancholic medievalism 69 Mathias Enard’s Compass: medievalism and dis-orientalism 77 2: Medievalism Re-oriented: Tariq Ali’s Islam Quintet and the ‘Arab’ Historical Novel 89 The Islam Quintet as diasporic fiction 89 Predecessors: pan-Arabism and the historical novel 96 Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree 98 The Book of Saladin 108 A Sultan in Palermo 116 3: The Name of the Hobbit: Halflings, Hominins, and Deep Time 126 The Flores Hobbit and the story of world humanity 134 Medievalizing the prehistoric 139 Medievalism and containment of the deep global past 150 4: Ten Canoes and 1066: Aboriginal Time and the Limits of Medievalism 159 The medieval and the coeval 159 World and Country 163 Ten Canoes 166 Ten Canoes and Arnhem Land’s ‘medieval’ time 170 Ten Canoes and Australian colonial medievalism 176 Medievalism, temporality, and dreamtime 180 BIBLIOGRAPHY 194 INDEX 212