Buch, Englisch, 592 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 995 g
Australasia and the Constitution of U.S. Literature
Buch, Englisch, 592 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 995 g
ISBN: 978-0-19-062399-9
Verlag: Oxford University Press
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.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
- Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
- Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Australische und Pazifische Geschichte
- Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte
Weitere Infos & Material
- Preface
- 1. American Literature and the Antipodean Imaginary: Imperialism,Transnationalism, Surrealism
- 2. Parallax Zones: The Founding Fathers and Austral Enlightenment
- Satiric Double-Binds: Benjamin Franklin's Biloquism
- Planetary Perspectives: Crèvecoeur's New Holland
- Transposing the West: Jefferson and Ledyard
- 3. Early National Orbits: Geography, Astronomy, and the Cycles of the Earth
- Freneau, Alsop, and Neoclassical Style
- Joel Barlow: The Columbiad
- Charles Brockden Brown: Systems of General Geography
- 4. Aurora Australis: Antebellum Seascapes and the Southern Cross
- The Hidden Antipodes: Irving's "Globular" Narratives
- The Southern Sea: Dana and Poe
- "Ex Ex" Narratives: Wilkes and Cooper
- 5. Transcendental Burlesque: Reorienting Manifest Destiny
- "The Other Side of the Sphere": Melville and Australasia
- Rotating the Axis: The Gold Rush Circuit
- "The Earth reversed her Hemispheres": Dickinson's Antipodality
- 6. Empire Upside Down: Victorian Globalization and Colonial Equations
- Civil War, Imperial Circumference: Lincoln and Trollope
- Family Romance, Domestic Disturbance: Kingsley and Southworth
- Spatio-Temporal Triangulation: Henry Adams
- The Laughing Jackass: Twain's Latitudinal Parallels
- 7. Ancestral Modernisms: Indigeneity and the Articulation of Distance
- Irish Aesthetic Nativism: John Boyle O'Reilly
- Racialism and Socialism: Jack London
- The Primitivist Paradox: Federation's "weird country"
- 8. Transpacific Transgression: Gender Remapping and World Revolutions
- The Boundaries of Utopia: Howells, Gilman, Miles Franklin
- Lola Ridge and the Appulsive Avant-Garde
- "The Twinness of Things": Stead's Surrealist Dialectic
- 9. Pacific Theaters: The Poetry of Violence, from World War II to Vietnam
- Karl Shapiro's "backward crab"
- Louis Simpson: Racial Métissage and Southern Pastoral
- The New York Poets: Inversion and Misrepresentation
- "America rhymes with Australia": Yusef Komunyakaa
- 10. Antipodean American Postmodernism: Turning the Subject Inside Out
- Irish Intertexts: Chandler and Keneally
- Contrarian Tendencies: Hazzard, Rushdie, Carey
- "Transposabilities": The Posthumanist Spectrum
- J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Disorientation
- Conclusion: American Literature's Terra Incognita
- Notes
- Works Cited
