Paradoxically, Australian nationalist accounts have tended to slight the earliest Australian literature by white settlers from the nineteenth century. This chapter surveys the literary history of this period, examning writers such as Oliné Keese, Ada Cambridge, Henry Kingsley, Rosa Praed, and Catherine Helen Spence. Drawing connections between these writers and the transnational Anglophone literary world centering on Great Britain and the United States, this chapter takes a comparative perspective that at once acknowledges the peripheral standing of these Australian texts and argues for their relevance to the history of the novel in English.

This essay describes how the antipodal turn has impacted upon World Literature in both its geographic and figurative dimensions. It examines the history of the term antipodean in relation to a rhetoric of transposition and also considers it in the context of ecological and Indigenous criticism, as well as the new prominence of the Global South. The essay addresses the specific relevance of Australian culture to this formation, and it concludes by suggesting ways in which this antipodal turn might constitute a productive critical method.

This chapter argues that the geographical heterodoxy of Pacific surrealism might be understood as a correlative to surrealism’s transgressive impulse, extending logics of inversion across oceanic space. It discusses how irregular forms of mapping were commensurate with surrealism’s aesthetics of defamiliarization. More specifically, the chapter discusses representations of Pacific iconography in visual artists (Man Ray, Brassaï), visits to Pacific regions by European surrealists (Paul Eluard, Jacques Viol) and the role played by surrealism in theorizations of ethnography (Claude Lévi-Strauss). It also analyzes the ways in which Pacific space was understood by theorists of surrealism such as Bernard Smith and James Clifford, while addressing the complicated political situation of surrealism in mid-twentieth-century Japan. The chapter subsequently tracks more recent manifestations of surrealism in Pacific writers and artists such as Aloï Piloko, Shane Cotton, Len Lye and Alexis Wright, commenting on connections with cultures of indigeneity and ways in which these artists integrate styles of hybridity.

Of all eminent American public figures over the past 230 years, perhaps none has been as hostile in principle to the idea of transnationalism as Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's professed goal was to consolidate the United States as “one national family,” a nation predicated on “territorial integrity,” whose Constitution, so he argued in 1864, represented the country's “organic law.” Lincoln began his own career as a policer of national boundaries during the Black Hawk War, Indian skirmishes “in what was then the West.” His lifelong attempt to define and circumscribe the parameters of the nation always impelled him toward a deep suspicion of anything that might undermine the idea of such “organic” unity. Characteristically, Lincoln opposed the Mexican War of the 1840s and expressed no enthusiasm for the annexation of Texas, on the grounds that such expansionist moves might unsettle the U.S. national framework. He himself never set foot outside the country, even when serving as president, and he also resisted moves to reopen the Atlantic slave trade – partly on moral grounds, but also to protect the United States from disruptive foreign influences. In his “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum” in Springfield, Illinois, delivered in 1838 at an early point in his public career, Lincoln suggested that fears for “some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean, and crush us at a blow” were much less plausible than the likelihood that “danger . . . if it ever reach us . . . must spring up amongst us,” and he stuck to this basic design throughout the rest of his political life.

The idea of transatlantic exchange informing English poetry of the early modern period is an old conception, one that can be traced back as far as Anne Bradstreet's “Dialogue Between Old England and New” (1630), which plays out through the form of a poetic dialogue those frictions between Anglican Establishment and Puritan dissent that permeated the English-speaking world at this time. Bradstreet wrote this work in the same year as she migrated with her husband and parents – her father, Thomas Dudley, was a steward in the Earl of Lincoln's household – to Massachusetts Bay, and her poetry in general mediates stylistically the relative values of courtly Renaissance decorum and individualistic self-scrutiny. In the second half of the twentieth century, Bradstreet was characteristically appropriated as the harbinger of an authentic American idiom by the likes of John Berryman, whose epic “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” (1956) celebrates her as the first of the confessional poets, and by Adrienne Rich, whose 1966 essay “The Tensions of Anne Bradstreet” installs Bradstreet as the inaugurator of an American feminist tradition in the way she shows “the limitations of a point of view which took masculine history and literature as its center.” In a clear corollary to her own flight in the 1950s and 1960s from poetic formalism into a looser experiential mode, Rich went on in this critical essay to praise Bradstreet for her escape from the generic conventions that had circumscribed her earlier writings: “No more Ages of Man, no more Assyrian monarchs; but poems in response to the simple events in a woman's life.” But what such emancipationist rhetoric ignores are the manifold ways in which Bradstreet creatively reoriented the ritualistic works of Philip Sidney and Guillaume du Bartas in order to exemplify, by dialogic contrast, the ways in which a nonconformist spirit might be able to seek space for itself behind the elaborate monuments of European courtly traditions. Bradstreet's poetry always needs the models of Sidney and Bartas to play itself off against; her work is not sequentially English and then American, but transatlantic from first to last.