Printable version 
The Australian Literature Resource
Project leader: Dr Kim Wilkins
Welcome to Australian Popular Medievalism, one of the specialist research projects underway through the AustLit Australian Popular Fictions Research Community.
The Australian Popular Medievalism project was established in 2009 to gauge the extent and importance of medieval images and ideas in Australian popular fiction. Recent work in the field of Australian medievalism has not yet investigated Australian popular fiction closely. This research project demonstrates how strongly Australian popular fiction engages with the medieval.
This dataset began life as a thought that if, over the last 15 years, 250 or so literary novels had been published that featured contemporary New York City as a setting, it would have attracted critical attention (one might argue that even 25 such novels would have done so). What this dataset exposes is more than 250 popular novels that feature Europe in the Middle Ages: either as an actual setting, or as a source for adapting images and ideas. In fact, recent Australian popular fiction offers perhaps the most sustained engagement with the Middle Ages in Australian literature, and certainly in Australian popular culture.
Read Kim Wilkins' peer reviewed article 'Bell, Book, and Battleaxe : Australian Popular Medievalism' HERE.
Australian Popular Medievalism covers novels published 1995-2010. In 1995, HarperCollins launched their fantasy imprint Voyager and published Sara Douglass's first novel Battleaxe. Because fantasy fiction accounts for more than half of this research subset, I felt this text was an appropriate 'ground zero' for the project, while also fulfilling a goal for the popular fiction tagged to be 'recent'.
The choice was made, very early in the study, to limit the form to novels. This decision was partly practical: to track down hundreds of short stories would be time-consuming and, as short stories exist mostly in small-press, low print-run collections, the law of diminishing returns applied. The novel is the mainstay of the popular fiction market.
The other choice made was to limit the study to adult novels. Again, part of this decision was practical. The volume of children's books published every year was prohibitive, and it would have meant tracking down picture books for preschoolers, school readers, any book about fairies or fairy tales, and so on. A side-effect of this choice became the lack of coverage of young adult fiction, in particular some very interesting writers working with medieval ideas such as Alison Croggan, Garth Nix, Isobelle Carmody, and Catherine Jinks whose Pagan Chronicles are set in the Crusades. In this regard, the project is not as comprehensive as it might have been. This presents just one avenue for future research within the subset.
The subset does not include works of literary fiction. It is designed with the researcher who may know little or nothing about Australian popular fiction in mind.
Fantasy fiction, the most evident forum for medieval images and ideas, seemed the most logical starting point. Subsequently, the project moved its focus to historical fiction, then worked through the other genres including thriller, science fiction, and romance until we were seeing the same titles appearing repeatedly and decided we had reached saturation point.
Medievalist texts were identified and rated by the interrogation:
- Were the representations of the medieval direct (as they are in historical fiction) or indirect (as they are in, say, fantasy fiction)?
- Was the penetration of medieval ideas (called 'importance' in the subset) high, medium, or low?
A medievalist fantasy novel like Kate Forsyth's The Tower of Ravens (2004) for example, would receive a rating of 'high indirect' (HI). That is, the penetration of ideas is high (eg. castles, towers, medieval dress) but the representation was indirect indicating here that the setting was imaginary. A thriller such as Nathan Burrage's Fivefold, would receive a rating of 'low direct' (LD) because, while largely set in contemporary times, it features a frame narrative set in 14th century Yorkshire.
These ratings are, to an extent, arbitrary on several counts - does a romance novel with a hero surnamed Knight and many puns about rescue qualify as low indirect, or not belong on the subset at all?
Work on the subset will continue over the coming years to keep it up to date and respond to input from scholars and writers.
Kim Wilkins, Drew Whitehead, Oliver Chadwick
Australian Popular Medievalism is a separately published work within AustLit.
AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource 2004-
This work is published Under Creative Commons License: Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Australia:
You are free to copy, distribute, adapt and transmit this work on the condition that you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). You may not use this work for commercial purposes without permission from the copyright holder. For further information see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/au/
Australian Popular Medievalism
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN - 978 0 9806322 2 4
1. Fantasy fiction, Australian -- Bibliography.
2. Popular culture and literature.
3. Medievalism – Australia.
I. Wilkins, Kim.
Funding to assist this project came from The University of Queensland’s Early Career Research Grant and The University of Queensland's New Staff Research Start-Up Fund.
