Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: Ann: In Tony Hillerman's crime novels, the two detectives, Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, with different temperaments and skills, begin following clues to a mystery unbeknownst to each other, pursuing separate trails, only meeting towards the end with what they think they've worked out.5 Though this is an essay jointly worked out and worked upon, I start in the first person, introducing issues which lead us to bring together the concepts 'history' and 'allegory'.John will then explore allegory as an aesthetic, referring to Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and Cesare Ripa's Iconologia.I return to explore the ways in which an understanding of history as allegory helps us develop more complex readings of historical texts; I take as my example (and I could have taken practically any example) Australian historical writing on the convict past, especially the female convict past, a foundational story in white Australia's bizarre beginnings.We will then jointly conclude with some reflections on history's mimetic and fantastical character, relating historiography in its formative period to nineteenth-century desires to defeat time and death, either by preservation or by precision and exactitude of reproduction, as in Egyptology taxidermy, photography, and in fin de siecle film.Through a focus on the nature and forms of historical discourse, in this case on its inescapable and complex allegorical character, our ongoing project is to try to specify the Westernness of Western historical writing-in Dipesh Chakrabarty's fine phrase, to 'provincialize Europe'.
Source: Humanities Research
Authors: Ann Curthoys, John Docker
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1893081484