Cirrus@Austlit

'Paul Giles has had an incredibly prolific and successful career as a literary academic. As an Americanist, he has reminded the institution of American literature precisely what it has neglected because of the American system—namely its transatlantic connections, and, more recently, after moving to the University of Sydney, he has also reminded it of its transpacific connections. He has explored these areas in a prolific, comprehensive, and learned series of books. These books are remarkable, not just for kicking on so much but being so scrupulous, getting the details right, being so well written, and being very generous in their citations of specialists who have worked in a far narrower field than Giles has, but whose critical explorations have provided the foundations for synthesis such as the ones he has undertaken. Giles’s achievement is a lesson to the critic that one can be ambitious without being sloppy, and that one can be conceptually daring yet still explore concrete ways, archives, publishing, history, and the nooks and crannies of critical reception. For all the heady originality of the book’s sweeping argument, the text is always kept on an argumentative throughline, and potential tensions all make sense within the book’s determinate frame.' (Introduction)