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Issue Details: First known date: 2010... 2010 Shirley Hazzard’s Australia : Belated Reading and Cultural Mobility
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

This essay examines Shirley Hazzard’s representation of and reception in Australia by returning to her 1984 Boyer Lectures, arguing that from the perspective of twenty-five years hindsight, they provide a useful contribution to recent conversations about the critical location of Australian literary culture in international contexts, including in particular, the cosmopolitan. In attending to the operations of time and space in Hazzard’s account of her contemporary world, this ‘delayed’ reading of the lectures provides for a more complex understanding of her significance in the contemporary field of Australian literary studies, arguing that in its striking presentation of Cold War locations and events, Hazzard’s work stages a decided move away from the specifically colonial frames that organise Australian cosmopolitanism, and that in this, her work generates a distinctive form of cosmopolitan cultural mobility, and as a consequence a distinctive perspective on Australia. (Author's abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon JASAL Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature; Common Readers and Cultural Critics Special Issue 2010 Z1717121 2010 periodical issue 2010

Works about this Work

‘Turning a Place into a Field' : Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire and Cold War Area Studies Robert Dixon , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Reading Across the Pacific : Australia-United States Intellectual Histories 2010; (p. 265-279)
''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)
‘Turning a Place into a Field' : Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire and Cold War Area Studies Robert Dixon , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Reading Across the Pacific : Australia-United States Intellectual Histories 2010; (p. 265-279)
''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)
Last amended 19 Jun 2017 13:14:47
https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/9618/9507 Shirley Hazzard’s Australia : Belated Reading and Cultural Mobilitysmall AustLit logo JASAL
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