Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture

Reviews / Votes

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. * Peter Mathews, professor of English in South Korea, Australian Literary Studies * Backgazing is full of brilliant ideas drawn from Giles's considerable knowledge of early twentieth-century writing across the hemispheres. While few readers will be able to match his breadth of reading, many will find parts of the book illuminating and be persuaded by this new arrangement of twentieth-century world literature and Australian literature's place within it. * Susan Lever, Cambria Australian Literature Series, Inside Story * Backgazing puts Australia onto the map of global modernism while resurrecting the issue of modernist time for the twenty-first century. It does so with a sweep, an authority, and a scrupulousness of attention that readers have come to expect from the superb work of Paul Giles. * Nicholas Birns, New York University, Modern Language Quarterly * Two of the bravura readings at the centre of this study are of Thomas Mann and Eleanor Dark. It's worth reading this book for these alone...There are many fascinating points of difference with Dark. There is also a fascinating interlude about H.G. Wells, his entanglements with Australia, and his The Conquest if Time (1942), with a fitting preface about Douglas Sirk's 1937 film To New Shores (Zu neuen Ufern) * Philip Mead, University of Western Australia. , Australian Book Review * A first dimension of Giles's argument is to add Australian voices (literary voices, of course, but also critical ones) to the discussion of modernism, so that such figures as Joseph Furphy, R. D. FitzGerald, Kenneth Slessor, H. H. Richardson, Eleanor Dark, and James Farrell (among others) enter the analysis alongside much more familiar modernists...Giles is a superb critic, and he brings these works into full literary life, making the case for their interest and value in their own right, and even more in a rich dialogue with modernists who are more widely known. * Modernist Culture *