This essay traces the relationship between colonization and academia over recent times, associating it with various intellectual moves to interrogate the hegemonic assumptions of Western culture. It argues that racial representations in literature are multifaceted and variegated, with literary studies offering opportunities to effectively demystify myths about the putative universality of American or European subject systems. This is tied to the historical specificity of particular colonial situations, with reference to the work of Nicholas Thomas, noting how one significant contribution of Australian cultural theory to literary studies has been to make debates around settler colonial paradigms more prominent. This leads into discussion of larger questions around regional autonomy, cultural appropriation and social class, with reference to the work of Walter Mignolo and Stuart Hall. It also touches upon political controversies involving with the highly problematic relationship between academic and civic authorities, a continuing power struggle that can be traced back to medieval times. The essay concludes that the etymological links between university and universality offer scope to resist local standardizations of all kinds, and in this sense a decentring of racial hierarchies runs in parallel to a decentring of geographical hierarchies.

This chapter considers ways in which the Australian novel emerged in the early nineteenth century through a cross-pollination of different genres and narrative styles that moved across national boundaries. It discusses the institutional assumptions that have informed the construction of national literatures more generally, while examining the intermixture of fact and fiction that gave impetus to the formation of the Australian novel. It discusses in particular how Henry Savery’s Quintus Servinton and James Tucker’s Ralph Rashleigh reimagine the traditional cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Europe, creating an idiom of mock epic that speaks to a new world of political radicalism and moral ambivalence. Such ambiguities are also traced in John Lang’s The Forger’s Wife and Lady Mary Fox’s Account of an Expedition to the Interior of New Holland, with the latter indicating how the eighteenth-century philosophical novel continued to shape nineteenth-century Australian fiction. This mixture of influences is also considered in relation to novels by Charles Rowcroft, Alexander Harris, Louisa Atkinson, Anna Maria Bunn and others, suggesting that early Australian fiction encompasses a greater geographical and intellectual range than is commonly assumed. The essay concludes that the early Australian novel should properly be understood as a compelling and significant part of World Literature.

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.