AustLit

'Nicolas Rothwell is perhaps best known as a critic of art and culture for The Australian, though he has also published several non-fiction books, one of which, Quicksilver, won a Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2016. Red Heaven, subtitled a ‘fiction’, is only the second of Rothwell’s books not to be classified as non-fiction. Always straddling the boundary between different genres, Rothwell has cited in Quicksilver Les Murray’s similar defence of generic hybridity in Australia: the novel ‘may not be the best or only form which extended prose fiction here requires’. Working from northern Australia, and intent upon exploring how landscape interacts obliquely with established social customs, Rothwell, in his narratives, consistently fractures traditional fictional forms so as to realign the conventional world of human society with more enigmatic temporal and spatial dimensions.' (Introduction)

'Opening with Christos Tsiolkas’s critique of multiculturalism, this essay considers the theory and practice of Irish-Australian literature in relation to questions of ethnicity and transnationalism. By comparing Irish-Australian to Irish-American literature and discussing ways in which theology becomes transposed into anthropology, it engages with problems of how to define such hybrid traditions and how they intersect (or conflict) with national narratives within a larger discursive domain. Australian authors such as Gerald Murnane, Thomas Keneally and Rosa Praed are compared to Irish authors based in London such as Oscar Wilde, with the essay arguing that Irish-Australian literature should be understood as an inherently relational rather than identitarian term. It also considers how Irish-Australian literature impacted upon racial politics across a global axis in the nineteenth century through John Boyle O’Reilly’s friendship with Frederick Douglass.'

Source: Abstract.

'The theme of The Planetary Clock is the representation of time in postmodern culture and the way temporality as a global phenomenon manifests itself differently across an antipodean axis. To trace postmodernism in an expansive spatial and temporal arc, from its formal experimentation in the 1960s to environmental concerns in the twenty-first century, is to describe a richer and more complex version of this cultural phenomenon. Exploring different scales of time from a Southern Hemisphere perspective, with a special emphasis on issues of Indigeneity and the Anthropocene, The Planetary Clock offers a wide-ranging, revisionist account of postmodernism, reinterpreting literature, film, music, and visual art of the post-1960 period within a planetary framework.

'By bringing the culture of Australia and New Zealand into dialogue with other Western narratives, it suggests how an antipodean impulse, involving the transposition of the world into different spatial and temporal dimensions, has long been an integral (if generally occluded) aspect of postmodernism. Taking its title from a Florentine clock designed in 1510 to measure worldly time alongside the rotation of the planets, The Planetary Clock ranges across well-known American postmodernists (John Barth, Toni Morrison) to more recent science fiction writers (Octavia Butler, Richard Powers), while bringing the US tradition into juxtaposition with both its English (Philip Larkin, Ian McEwan) and Australian (Les Murray, Alexis Wright) counterparts. By aligning cultural postmodernism with music (Messiaen, Ligeti, Birtwistle), the visual arts (Hockney, Blackman, Fiona Hall), and cinema (Rohmer, Haneke, Tarantino), this volume enlarges our understanding of global postmodernism for the twenty-first century.' (Publication summary)

'This volume trace ways in which time is represented in reverse forms throughout modernist culture, from the beginning of the twentieth century until the decade after World War II. Though modernism is often associated with revolutionary or futurist directions, this book argues instead that a retrograde dimension is embedded within it. By juxtaposing the literature of Europe and North America with that of Australia and New Zealand, it suggests how this antipodean context serves to defamiliarize and reconceptualize normative modernist understandings of temporal progression. Backgazing thus moves beyond the treatment of a specific geographical periphery as another margin on the expanding field of 'New Modernist Studies'. Instead, it offers a systematic investigation of the transformative effect of retrograde dimensions on our understanding of canonical modernist texts.

'The title, 'backgazing', is taken from Australian poet Robert G. FitzGerald's 1938 poem 'Essay on Memory', and it epitomizes how the cultural history of modernism can be restructured according to a radically different discursive map. Backgazing intellectually reconfigures US and European modernism within a planetary orbit in which the literature of Australia and the Southern Hemisphere, far from being merely an annexed margin, can be seen substantively to change the directional compass of modernism more generally. By reading canonical modernists such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot alongside marginalized writers such as Nancy Cunard and others and relatively neglected authors from Australia and New Zealand, this book offers a revisionist cultural history of modernist time, one framed by a recognition of how its measurement is modulated across geographical space.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A Season on Earth is the original version of Gerald Murnane’s second published novel, A Lifetime on Clouds, which appeared in 1976. The story behind this book’s publication is now well known, thanks to interviews Murnane has given and the author’s ‘foreword’ to this edition, where he relates how he reluctantly cut his manuscript in half to fit with Heinemann editor Edward Kynaston’s view of it as ‘a comic masterpiece’. Kynaston was probably trying to exploit the publicity surrounding Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, which had become a cause célèbre in Australia after being initially banned in 1970 but then published after its acquittal in an obscenity trial. The ‘sin of self-abuse’ is also central to Murnane’s novel. Towards the end of A Lifetime on Clouds, rewritten by the author especially for that earlier version, central protagonist Adrian Sherd imagines Melbourne to be ‘the Masturbation capital of the world’, but then comes to realise ‘the same problem occurred in every civilized country on earth’.' (Introduction)

'On learning that the premise of Peter Carey’s new novel involved a test of automobile reliability on a round trip across Australia, my first response was to dismiss it as a thin conceit for encompassing the country’s remoter landscape within a work of the imagination. The internet, however, quickly delivered old Pathé newsreels revealing not only that this Redex Trial was a demonstrable historical event, but also that no less than 50,000 people showed up at Sydney Showground to see the cars off on their cross-country journey. Truth, indeed, can sometimes seem stranger than fiction. Didn’t they have anything better to do, even in 1954?' (Introduction)

'Interest among writers in conceptions of the planetary is far from a recent phenomenon. Srinivas Aravamudan, for instance, has discussed how “interplanetary reflections” were a staple of intellectual life during the Enlightenment, when astronomical attempts to explicate rotations of the planets worked as a corollary to the geographical exploration of distant lands that was also characteristic of this era.1 Hester Blum has similarly emphasized how “theories of planetarity” are freighted with “a historical specificity” through her discussion of John Cleves Symmes’s appropriation of Arctic space in his highly idiosyncratic geophysical inquiries of the 1820s, which involved attempts to discover a hollow interior to the Earth.2 In this sense, there is a possibility that twenty-first-century debates around “a turn to the planet,” in the title of a celebrated essay by Masao Miyoshi, may risk foreshortening complex cultural and historical perspectives by focusing so insistently on one irreducible, all-encompassing sphere, as if the planet were a fundamental trope, like the one true god. Miyoshi’s 2001 essay does evoke specific material and political concerns: “global neoliberalism,” the importance of class, the way the world is “deterritorialized” for the rich but “sectioned into nations and nationalities for those who cannot afford to move or travel beyond their home countries.” Nevertheless, Miyoshi ultimately goes on to argue that in light of “the all-involving process of air pollution, ozone layer depletion, ocean contamination, toxic accumulation, and global warming,” the very concept of “literary studies” has now been reduced to “one basis and goal: to nurture our common bonds to the planet—to replace the imaginaries of exclusionist familialism, communitarianism, nationhood, ethnic culture, regionalism, ‘globalization,’ or even humanism, with the ideal of planetarianism.”3 Along parallel lines, Wai Chee Dimock has suggested that, in relation to ecology and “the non-negotiability of our physical end,” the idea of the “planetary” involves a sense of scale that challenges “the territoriality of the nationstate,” bound as the latter customarily is to protectionist understandings of sovereignty.4 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak likewise distinguishes between the words “planet” and “world” or “globe,” which latter terms are, in Spivak’s 144 Paul Giles account, more beholden to “the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere,” in “the gridwork of electronic capital.”' (Introduction)

'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.' (Publication summary)