Date: Thursday 14 September 2017
Time: 5‒7pm
Venue: Woolley Common Room, John Woolley Building A20, The University of Sydney
Cost: Free
Contact: Bastian Phelan (bastian.phelan@sydney.edu.au)
What might it mean for a poem to come true? Demons Land is the story of a rapturous Romantic called The Collector, who in 1798 is transported to an island beneath the known world. He thinks the island savage and formless, and determines to remake it in the image of his favourite poem. That poem is Edmund Spenser's hallucinogenic epic, The Faerie Queene, a poem equally of militant Protestantism and erotic transport, written in the service of the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland. Like the poem that is its inspiration and antitype, Demons Land offers a shadowy allegory of the dreams and crimes of empire ‒ as a political and racial act; and as an expression of sexual desire and imaginative speculation. This vast, conflicted poem becomes the seminal text of the unfinished modern world.
Simon Palfrey is Professor of English Literature at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. He is a founding editor of the Bloomsbury series 'Shakespeare Now!' and 'Beyond Criticism'. His books include Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Oxford, 1997), Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford, 2007, with Tiffany Stern), Doing Shakespeare (Arden, 2004, 2nd ed. 2011), Shakespeare's Possible Worlds (Cambridge, 2014), Poor Tom: Living King Lear (Chicago, 2014). His most recent publications are Shakespeare's Dead (Bodleian Library/Chicago, 2016, with Emma Smith) and the novel Macbeth, Macbeth (Bloomsbury, 2016), written with Ewan Fernie. In 2017, he is a Distinguished International Visitor with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100‒1800.
Image: Film still from Demons land, Mark Jones, Tom de Freston and Simon Palfrey, 2017.