Medievalism and Memory Work: Archer's Folly and the Gothic Revival Pile

Abstract

This chapter argues that medievalism in Australian culture needs to be understood through a postcolonial theory alert to a new historicist reading of cultural artefacts while nuanced by psychoanalysis. The focus of such a reading is the work of memory. 'Medievalism' is taken to mean the re-use of the medieval past and thus includes cultural, economic and academic practices. The artefacts read are dispersed across nineteenth-century records of property sale, a stone tower and a Gothic building, documents of twenthieth-century debate around the value of education and a range of memoirs.