Although North America and Australasia occupy opposite ends of the
earth, they have never been that far from each other conceptually.
The United States and Australia both began as British colonies and
mutual entanglements continue today, when contemporary cultures of
globalization have brought them more closely into juxtaposition.
Taking this transpacific kinship as his focus, Paul Giles presents
a sweeping study that spans two continents and over three hundred
years of literary history to consider the impact of Australia and
New Zealand on the formation of U.S. literature. Early American
writers such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Joel Barlow
and Charles Brockden Brown found the idea of antipodes to be a
creative resource, but also an alarming reminder of Great Britain's
increasing sway in the Pacific. The southern seas served as
inspiration for narratives by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe,
and Herman Melville. For African Americans such as Harriet Jacobs,
Australia represented a haven from slavery during the gold rush
era, while for E.D.E.N. Southworth its convict legacy offered an
alternative perspective on the British class system. In the 1890s,
Henry Adams and Mark Twain both came to Australasia to address
questions of imperial rivalry and aesthetic topsy-turvyness. The
second half of this study considers how Australia's political
unification through Federation in 1901 significantly altered its
relationship to the United States. New modes of transport and
communication drew American visitors, including novelist Jack
London. At the same time, Americans associated Australia and New
Zealand with various kinds of utopian social reform, particularly
in relation to gender politics, a theme Giles explores in William
Dean Howells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Miles Franklin. He also
considers how American modernism in New York was inflected by the
Australasian perspectives of Lola Ridge and Christina Stead, and
how Australian modernism was in turn shaped by American styles of
iconoclasm. After World War II, Giles examines how the poetry of
Karl Shapiro, Louis Simpson, Yusef Komunyakaa, and others was
influenced by their direct experience of Australia. He then shifts
to post-1945 fiction, where the focus extends from Irish-American
cultural politics (Raymond Chandler, Thomas Keneally) to the
paradoxes of exile (Shirley Hazzard, Peter Carey) and the
structural inversions of postmodernism and posthumanism (Salman
Rushdie, Donna Haraway). Ranging from figures like John Ledyard to
John Ashbery, from Emily Dickinson to Patricia Piccinini and J. M.
Coetzee, Antipodean America is a truly epic work of transnational
literary history.
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