Antipodean America : Australasia and the constitution of U.S. literature

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Antipodean America : Australasia and the constitution of U.S. literature

Paul Giles

(Oxford studies in American literary history, 4)

Oxford University Press, c2013

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Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

A sweeping study that spans two continents and over three hundred years of literary history, Antipodean America argues that images of Australasia as an imagined "end of the earth" establishes the presence of an understudied historical and global consciousness, oriented toward the Pacific, in American literature. Paul Giles shows how places like Australia and New Zealand become the silent other whose likenesses to the US induce condescension, fear, paranoia, envy, rivalry, and narcissistic appropriation. The American engagement with Australasia, Giles demonstrates, has been constant since the eighteenth century and it is evinced in works by the most canonical figures in US literary history. Reading a range of works by figures like Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, and John Ashbery, alongside writers like Miles Franklin, Peter Carey, and J.M. Coetzee, Antipodean America provides a welcome transnational perspective that will redefine our perception of what constitutes American literature.

Table of Contents

  • 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: Crevecoeur'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 Metissage 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

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