AustLit

'This paper will consider the theoretical implications of reading American and Australian/New Zealand literature against each other, in a transnational orientation. It will suggest ways in which the "transpacific" might in itself be too constricting a term to describe this conceptual framework, since both the United States and Australia also related in triangular ways to the colonizing culture of imperial Britain. The paper will take a number of nineteenth-century American authors - Charles Brockden Brown, Joel Barlow, Washington Irving, Emily Dickinson - and will suggest the importance of an antipodean imaginary to their writings. It will also look briefly at a number of twentieth-century authors whose work might be considered on a transpacific axis - Christina Stead, Peter Carey, J. M. Coetzee - in order to suggest the value of a transnational approach in opening up both American and Australian literature to new horizons' (Author's abstract).