Issue Details: First known date: 2010... 2010 Antipodal Propinquities? : Environmental (Mis)Perceptions in American and Australian Literary History
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

This paper focuses on certain challenges for environmental memory that seem to follow from historic quasi-affinities of Australia and the United States as Anglocentric settler cultures with longstanding frontier/outback traditions driven by boom-and-bust capitalism that in modern times have become much more self-consciously multi-cultural, much more urbanized, and much more ecologically self-conscious.
Specific issues discussed will include the quest for fuller recuperation of the ecocultural past (imagining ethno-racial and biodiversity across much longer horizons of time and space than colonial/national) and the proclivity for representing inland space as remote, opaque, gothic. Writers engaged during the course of the lecture may include Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Linda Hogan, Barry Lopez, William Least Heat Moon; Barbara Baynton, Patrick White (Author's abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Reading Across the Pacific : Australia-United States Intellectual Histories Robert Dixon (editor), Nicholas Birns (editor), Sydney : Sydney University Press , 2010 Z1754436 2010 anthology criticism 'Reading Across the Pacific is a study of literary and cultural engagement between the United States and Australia from a contemporary interdisciplinary perspective. The book examines the relations of the two countries, shifting the emphasis from the broad cultural patterns that are often compared, to the specific networks, interactions, and crossings that have characterised Australian literature in the United States and American literature in Australia.
    In the twenty-first century, both American and Australian literatures are experiencing new challenges to the very different paradigms of literary history and criticism each inherited from the twentieth century. In response to these challenges, scholars of both literatures are seizing the opportunity to reassess and reconfigure the conceptual geography of national literary spaces as they are reformed by vectors that evade or exceed them, including the transnational, the local and the global.
    The essays in Reading Across the Pacific are divided into five sections: National Literatures and Transnationalism, Poetry and Poetics, Literature and Popular Culture, The Cold War, and Publishing History and Transpacific Print Cultures' (Source: Publisher's website).
    Sydney : Sydney University Press , 2010
    pg. 3-22
Last amended 25 Feb 2011 09:59:12
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