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'This volume trace ways in which time is represented in reverse forms throughout modernist culture, from the beginning of the twentieth century until the decade after World War II. Though modernism is often associated with revolutionary or futurist directions, this book argues instead that a retrograde dimension is embedded within it. By juxtaposing the literature of Europe and North America with that of Australia and New Zealand, it suggests how this antipodean context serves to defamiliarize and reconceptualize normative modernist understandings of temporal progression. Backgazing thus moves beyond the treatment of a specific geographical periphery as another margin on the expanding field of 'New Modernist Studies'. Instead, it offers a systematic investigation of the transformative effect of retrograde dimensions on our understanding of canonical modernist texts.
'The title, 'backgazing', is taken from Australian poet Robert G. FitzGerald's 1938 poem 'Essay on Memory', and it epitomizes how the cultural history of modernism can be restructured according to a radically different discursive map. Backgazing intellectually reconfigures US and European modernism within a planetary orbit in which the literature of Australia and the Southern Hemisphere, far from being merely an annexed margin, can be seen substantively to change the directional compass of modernism more generally. By reading canonical modernists such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot alongside marginalized writers such as Nancy Cunard and others and relatively neglected authors from Australia and New Zealand, this book offers a revisionist cultural history of modernist time, one framed by a recognition of how its measurement is modulated across geographical space.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Notes
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Offers a comparative reading of Australian modernism against modernist temporality more generally.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Review of Backgazing : Reverse Time in Modernist Culture by Paul Giles
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 30 September vol. 37 no. 2 2022;
— Review of Backgazing : Reverse Time in Modernist Culture 2019 multi chapter work criticism'Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture by Paul Giles is an erudite and perceptive account of how the literature of Australia and New Zealand entwine with the key texts and ideas of literary and artistic modernism. Its particular value is how it shows, with satisfying weight, the value of both the antipodes and its literature on the global stage.' (Introduction)
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Imaginative Affinities
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Inside Story , September 2020;
— Review of Backgazing : Reverse Time in Modernist Culture 2019 multi chapter work criticism 'Australian modernist literature looks a little different through an international lens'
-
Review of Backgazing : Reverse Time in Modernist Culture by Paul Giles
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 30 September vol. 37 no. 2 2022;
— Review of Backgazing : Reverse Time in Modernist Culture 2019 multi chapter work criticism'Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture by Paul Giles is an erudite and perceptive account of how the literature of Australia and New Zealand entwine with the key texts and ideas of literary and artistic modernism. Its particular value is how it shows, with satisfying weight, the value of both the antipodes and its literature on the global stage.' (Introduction)
-
Imaginative Affinities
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Inside Story , September 2020;
— Review of Backgazing : Reverse Time in Modernist Culture 2019 multi chapter work criticism 'Australian modernist literature looks a little different through an international lens'