‘Turning a Place into a Field' : Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire and Cold War Area Studies single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2010... 2010 ‘Turning a Place into a Field' : Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire and Cold War Area Studies
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''It has been one of the enduring ironies of the study of Asia', writes Harry Harootunian, 'that Asia itself, as an object, simply doesn't exist'. In Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (2002), Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi observe that 'Historically, area studies programs...originated in the immediate post-World War II era and sought to meet the necessity of gathering and providing information about the enemy'. This was made possible by large infusions of money from a range of institutions, including private corporations, scholarly organisations and government agencies. Assisted by US military occupation, 'places' like Japan were turned into social laboratories where specialists from Europe, the US and Australia came to do field work. 'Turning a place into a field' was symptomatic of the orientalism endemic to Cold War area studies. In this chapter, I examine expatriate Australian writer Shirley Hazzard's novel The Great Fire (2003) in the context of Cold War orientalism.' (pp. 265-266)

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    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. 265-279
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Last amended 23 Feb 2011 15:02:42
265-279 ‘Turning a Place into a Field' : Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire and Cold War Area Studiessmall AustLit logo
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