In this book, Giles’s transnational perspective is still on the North American literary imagination – indeed, he revisits authors he has read transatlantically, such as Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, and Poe – but the alternative scenario of Antipodean America is about the view from the western Pacific rim, from the Australasian corner of the globe. Giles describes the genesis of this study as amazement, when he began to look at things from an Australian perspective in 2006, at how the ‘rich seam of antipodean material impacting upon classic American authors had generally been overlooked’. Although, as he recounts in his preface, there were anterior influences as well: being taught by Vandemonian Peter Conrad at Oxford, and reading, as an undergraduate, Ian Donaldson’s book about early modern comedy, The World Upside Down (1970). Whatever the contingencies of these personal, intellectual, and scholarly trajectories, they have enabled Paul Giles to produce a magisterial study of the ‘ways in which the southern continent of Australasia has shaped the trajectory over the past 230 years of what is now known as American literature’.

What Giles reads in American literature is a complex and contradictory projection of Australasia as a shadow self to US national narratives and post-colonial legacies, even while it is relatively and suspiciously invisible. American literature constitutes itself around a galaxy of narratives and tropes that constantly write and rewrite its own history, drawing on alternative and counter-factual entities, like Australasia, at the other end of the world. And the first step in this antipodean connection is one of the most disconcerting because, in the northern imaginary, Australia and its geographical neighbours are already antipodal, that is weird, contrary, monstrous, even surreal. Giles’s great critical skill is to demonstrate the ways in which American literary texts, including those written by Australian authors, don’t tell stories of freedom and independence in anything like the way narratives of a unitary and progressivist culture might want or prefer. The evidence of the literature is of every kind of inversion, haunting, suppression, distortion, avoidance, scrambled code, burlesque exaggeration, denial. As a non-US based Americanist, Giles is free to unfold this secret double-history of American literature that, as he implies, his US-based colleagues feel awkward about, for a host of reasons.

His first example is Benjamin Franklin’s representation of New Holland in satirical writings like ‘Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One’ (1773) and the way in which these characteristically use the idea of a topsy-turvy world to counter, by hollowing out, the global reach of British imperialism. Alongside this Giles offers a fascinating reading of the way in which J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, in satirical writings intertwined with Franklin’s, relied on the history of discovery and settlement of New Holland to provide a planetary mirror on the origins of American culture. Of these early writers that Giles focuses on, the Laurence Sterne-loving, Connecticut American John Ledyard (b. 1751; educated Dartmouth College), who joined Cook’s third voyage in the Resolution and was the first American to see Australia and New Zealand, is one of the most attractive. Ledyard’s narrative of this voyage, Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage (1783), sold well and influenced writers like Thoreau, Melville, and Twain, as well as Robert Frost (also a Dartmouth alumnus). For a masculinist readership, Ledyard was a paragon of escape, globetrotting, and frontier adventure. But it is not just the content of this writing that gives it its cultural valency, it is what Giles recognises as the ‘aesthetics of contradiction’ in Ledyard’s antipodean mentality, his narrative delight in turning things around, something he learnt presumably from Sterne, with his habit of never letting a contrary go by. Giles reads Ledyard as a ‘herald’ of antipodean America, epitomising ‘the ways in which geographical reorientation becomes commensurate with the larger conceptual and political implications of a world upside down’.

With the discussion of Joel Barlow and his epic poem The Columbiad (1807), what Australian critics would call a voyager poem, one of Giles’s strongest impulses emerges: rescuing symptomatic works from the condescension of (nationalist) posterity. A poem of the maritime discoveries of Columbus, Magellan, and Cook, The Columbiad has been marginalised within the American canon partly owing to its scientific and atheistic account of European expansion leading to the spread of American republicanism across the globe. Giles intuits the connection between Barlow’s hydrographic epic and the New Zealand–US critic J.G.A. Pocock’s perspective on transoceanic history that ‘regard[s] the world as an archipelago of histories rather than a tectonic of continents’. Alongside Barlow, Giles retrieves the lost federalist understanding of American history by cultural geographer Charles Brockden Brown, ideological perspectives that were ‘more or less written out of the American studies movement as it developed in the twentieth century’.

Paul Giles

Washington Irving is one of Giles’s favourite writers, one he thinks has been seriously ‘short-changed by the nationalist assumptions’ about American exceptionalism. In the course of his defence of Irving and his subversive use of burlesque, he notes the small knot of connection between the American writer and the mountaineering, pre-Port Phillip Charles Joseph La Trobe, who accompanied Irving on a trip across north America in 1832, about which they both published accounts: Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies and La Trobe’s The Rambler in North America both appeared in 1835. There follow other readings of nineteenth-century writers, including of the great figures of the American Renaissance, that uncover the ways antipodean perspectives lie hidden: Poe’s version of Tasmania, Tsalal, in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket; Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman’s trans-Pacific salutations to what they imagine as another America in the south seas; Emily Dickinson’s idea of the south. Later writers, who spend time in Australia, such as Henry Adams, are troubled by the Britishness of America’s ‘first cousin’, while Twain looks for instances of insurrection in Australian history, refiguring the United States from his equatorial perspective. A highlight on this historical trajectory is Giles’s reading of John Boyle O’Reilly’s once-banned Moondyne Joe as a Boston-based antipodean narrative of West Australian inversion of the British social order. Another is his reading of Lola Ridge’s trajectory from Dublin birth (1873), to New Zealand childhood, to Australian art school, and then to the 1920s New York poetry scene. The discernment of imagistic synergies between Ridge’s poems of a remembered New Zealand and the ‘Southern Cross’ section of Hart Crane’s The Bridge is truly remarkable.

From the early twentieth century, Giles reads Miles Franklin’s version of modernism in her American writings, On Dearborn Street and Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, alongside the personal and literary influence of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Giles’s contribution to our growing understanding of Christina Stead’s significance as a writer – he is particularly interested in The Man Who Loved Children, Letty Fox, and I’m Dying Laughing – is to point out her adherence to the possibilities of surrealism within socialist aesthetics and activism, particularly the influence of Louis Aragon. During and after World War II, a new space of American antipodean writing opens up in poetry and poetics. Karl Shapiro, Louis Simpson, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Yusef Komunyakaa all deal variously with the inversions and opposites Australia presents, either in firsthand experience or figuratively. While this is part of the story, Australian–US relations in poetry, and its thematic and figurative outworkings in poetics and poetry, are more complex and multi-layered than Giles has space to explore. Antipodean postmodernism in prose writing includes Raymond Chandler’s romance of Australia, there in Philip Marlowe’s gum-tree and koala-bear imaginings in The Long Goodbye, but also in Chandler’s Australian-born secretary Jean Fracasse and what Giles calls his ‘bizarre epistolary romance’ with Deirdre Gartrell at the University of New England, Armidale. With Shirley Hazzard, Christopher Isherwood, Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, and J.M. Coetzee, Giles reads the various disorientations their fictions produce in their antipodean figures and allegiances by reading the resonance of a minor place, and a minor literature, on the global scale. Coetzee’s particularly provocative antipodean play in Elizabeth Costello is, rightly, of special significance, as is the interrogation of geographical and hemispherical conventions in Thomas Pynchon’s 2006 novel Against the Day.

Giles’s contention is that Australasia ‘belongs’ constitutively to the US empire’s literary imaginary, in the sense that over more than two centuries it has been its southern Terra Incognita. And while this is recognised, intuited, or contrarily figured by the American writers Giles studies, it is largely ignored and suppressed by critics and historians of American literature. Hence Giles’s fascination with the multiple ways in which Australasia undoes the hauteurs of the North, the presumptions of the West. If there were any doubt about the simultaneously haunting and repressed nature of North American antipodean culture that Paul Giles so persuasively identifies, one only has to think of that final scene of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), with its gyroscopic realignment of Jordan Belfort and contemporary capitalism with Wellington, New Zealand – which looks and feels like nothing so much as a scene from a Peter Carey novel.