‘Form and Time’ is my doctoral thesis, produced for the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University, currently under examination.
Abstract:
This work contains two parts: Angauwa, a verse drama set five thousand years ago in the Danubian Plain, and an exegesis treating theoretical and practical issues arising from the creative process. Literary exploration of Europe prior to the advent of writing has been dominated by ‘prehistoric fiction’. That genre is based in archaeological interpretations of material evidence mediated by the discourse of prehistory, which, I argue, delimits a narrow range of storyworlds and narratives. Studies of prehistoric fiction tend to focus on their plausibility, fidelity to archaeological knowledge or ideological function. In this work, I present a challenge to both practice and theory. Angauwa draws on comparative studies to demonstrate alternative approaches to literary form and content: a storyworld grounded in historical linguistics, a narrative shaped by comparative analysis of Greek and Indian epic, and a verse form with a set of metres informed by Indo-European comparative poetics. The exegesis frames its description of Angauwa’s development in a critical history of prehistoric fiction; adapts Hans-Georg Gadamer’s historical hermeneutics as a method for narrative worldbuilding; and explores the phenomenologies of literary and dramatic reception and composition in the representation of an oral storyworld, a setting in which writing is absent. As a whole, this work offfers new perspectives on and creative practices for fictional narratives set in the ancient past.
Related work:
- ‘Mud’, notes on my experience of an archaeological dig at Tell Yunatsite, a site in Bulgaria
- ‘In Search of Lost Time: Fiction, Archaeology, and the Elusive Subject of Prehistory’, a journal article on the relationship of archaeology and the genre of prehistoric fiction
- ‘Epic Formulae’, a tool to classify phrases by metrical value that I used to devise a metrical system for the verse in Angauwa
- New Trad, a volume of poems and essays on poetics
- ‘Ghosts and Grave Robbers’, a poster presentation with information and poetry
- Current postgraduates page on the Writing and Society Research Centre website
- A series of posts for Southerly blog:
(Watch this space for more updates.)