Avrom Fleishman

Bio: Avrom Fleishman is an academic researcher. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 111 citations.

Claiming the Nation's Past: The Invention of an Anglo-Saxon Tradition:

Abstract: The reconstitution of continuities, of a suitable history which links present to past, characterizes most societies in moments of transition. The past alone, observed Disraeli, energizes an atrophied race when all else fails. An invented past, wisely manipulated, not only 'explains the present', but 'moulds the future'.' Invented continuities, to paraphrase Hobsbawm's over-used expression, are most likely to develop in modern communities.2 Indeed, the quest for historic continuities is to be looked for especially in those places and at those times in which a national identity emerges and crystallizes.3 But not only new or immature nations, or groups seeking to attach themselves to a real or an imagined 'nation', legitimize innovation by inventing a tradition. In some of the oldest national communities, exemplified in the 'mature' nation-states, identities have been challenged, defined and re-defined in diverse processes of inclusion (in the nation), exclusion (from it) and transformation.4 The case of the construction of an integrative English identity, through the possession and reinvention of an Anglo-Saxon inheritance, may illustrate the usages of the remote past in a society which was the first to be exposed to the related effects of industrialization and modernization. Although a great deal has been written on the meaning of medievalism in the 'age of industry', most studies of the Victorian usages of the Middle Ages focus on neo-feudalism and the cult of chivalry related to it.5 There is not one monograph on the development of Saxonism, or English Teutonism and the cultural significance of the veneration of pre-Norman England. The few studies we do have fix on the period after 1870, thus conveniently relating the preoccupation with ethnicity to modern imperialism and the ascendant, new 'democratic' Toryism.6 Earlier and formative phases in the evolution of a racial notion of Englishness are quite neglected.

Croyances religieuses et destinées individuelles dans le roman historique traitant de l'Antiquité : (XIXe & XXe siècles)

Abstract: Ce projet de these, choisi en vue de l’obtention du doctorat des litteratures francaise, francophones et comparee, consiste en une demarche litteraire comparatiste, axee sur dix romans rattaches, en theorie, au genre historique, et traitant tous de l’Antiquite. Le corpus des œuvres, etabli sur une periode recouvrant les XIXe et XXe siecles, comprend quatre romans francais : Les Martyrs de Chateaubriand (1809), Le Roman de la momie de Theophile Gautier (1858), Salammbo de Gustave Flaubert (1862), Memoires d’Hadrien de Marguerite Yourcenar (1951) ; et six romans etrangers : The Last Days of Pompeii d’Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), Quo vadis ? de Henryk Sienkiewicz (1895), Siddhartha. Eine Indische Dichtung de Hermann Hesse (1922), Der Tod des Vergil de Hermann Broch (1945), Aztec de Gary Jennings (1980) et Creation de Gore Vidal (1981). Cet echantillonnage representatif du genre archeo-fictif tient compte principalement de la notoriete des romans historiques, de leur diversite geographique et culturelle, et de leur adherence au sujet de these. En effet, chaque roman s’apparente a une tentative remarquable de reconstitution « archeologico-litteraire » d’une civilisation antique aneantie par l’erosion du temps : l’Egypte ancienne, Carthage, Rome, Pompei, la Grece, la Perse, l’Inde, le Cathay (la Chine antique) et l’empire azteque. « Les destinees et les croyances religieuses » constituent le sujet unificateur qui relie ces romans a leur contexte litteraire. Le probleme generique du roman historique ; le substrat religieux dans l’anastylose archeofictive ; la transfiguration religieuse des lieux et du langage dessinent les principales orientations litteraires de la these.

Postcolonial Departures: Narrative Transformations in Australian and South African Fictions

Abstract: This thesis is a comparative reading of selected contemporary fictions from Australia and South Africa. By drawing on postcolonial theory and trauma theory, this thesis argues that specific genres are transformed in distinctive ways in these two settler literatures to address the continuing presence of the colonial past. It focuses in particular on three genres: the Bildungsroman, the historical novel, and the pastoral to consider how these have been reproduced, adapted and transformed in these literatures in the recent past.This thesis argues that these transformations testify to the ways that recent Australian and South African literary imaginaries respond to the legacies of traumatic histories of colonization and dispossession. In both Australia and South Africa processes of reconciliation and social justice in recent decades have produced intense debates about history, fiction and the ways these disciplines can generate new ways of understanding the traumatic legacies of settler colonialism. By focusing on a selection of close and comparative readings, this thesis identifies a series of common tropes, techniques and preoccupations that draw together these two literatures which are so often read apart in terms of distinctive national histories.The first chapter, “Representation of Trauma in Two Selected Bildungsromane”, investigates how the genre of the Bildungsroman is rehabilitated and how its traditional boundaries are transgressed to explore the psychic landscapes of childhood trauma. Gail Jones’ Sorry (2008) and Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe (2005) are examined as case studies to suggest their departures from European traditions to include the legacies of colonisation. These challenge the traditional passage from adolescence to maturity in the Bildungroman, resulting in narratives where this journey remains incomplete.In the second chapter of the thesis, “Postcolonial Pastoral”, an analysis of how the pastoral engages in distinctively postcolonial forms suggests the flexibility and mutability of generic themes, such as landscape, borders, and memory, and reveals points of contact within the frame of trauma theory. The chapter focuses on David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993) and Lisa Fugard’s Skinner’s Drift (2005). Both postcolonial novels attack the traditional tropes of nostalgic myths and belonging to expose the settlers’ feelings of unsettledness in anti-pastoral scenes marked by traumatic memories and Indigenous dispossession.Recent contemporary Australian and South African historical novels challenge officially sanctioned national histories by engaging with the legacies of the colonial past. The third chapter, “Making Use of History”, focuses on alternative imaginings of histories of settlement in Australia and South Africa that center on the trauma of the past. In this final chapter, Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) and Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story (2001) are examined to investigate how they engage in revising their nations’ histories to recuperate a violent and silenced past. Both writers inscribe a traumatic memory within their historical texts to seek justice for a dispossessed people.This thesis argues that these fictions contribute to debates about colonialism, trauma and social justice, and that together they make a distinctive intervention into ways of thinking about contemporary postcolonial fiction.

History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Abstract: History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction combines innovative literary and historiographical analysis to investigate the way neo-Victorian novels conceptualise our relationship to the Victorian past, and to analyse their role in the production and communication of historical knowledge. Positioning neo-Victorian novels as dynamic participants in the contemporary historical imaginary, it explores their use of the Victorians' own vocabularies of history, memory and loss to re-member the nineteenth century today. While her focus is neo-Victorian fiction, Mitchell positions these novels in relation to debates about historical fiction's contribution to historical knowledge since the eighteenth century. Her use of memory discourse as a framework for understanding the ways in which they do lay claim to historical recollection, one which opens up a range of questions beyond historical fidelity on the one hand, and the problematics of representation on the other, suggests new ways of thinking about contemporary historical fiction and its prevalence, popular appeal, and nmnenonic function today.