Backgazing : Reverse time in modernist culture

The focus of this book is on how time is represented in reverse forms throughout modernist literature and culture, from about 1900 until the middle years of the twentieth century. It is particularly concerned with how antipodean reorientations of chronological scale reconfigure ways in which the conventional temporal categories of modernism are understood. It treats time neither as a philosophical nor as a theological concern but, rather, as a phenomenon shaped by material forces across different spatial and temporal trajectories. By foregrounding the antipodean slant of this project, it not only integrates the literature of Australia and other parts of the Southern Hemisphere into the broader trajectories of modernism, but also considers ways in which canonical narratives might productively be considered in relation to their antipodean dimensions, thereby opening up modernist narratives to various forms of systematic reversal. Backgazing thus reads canonical authors (Proust, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Mann, Auden) in relation to Australasian modernist writers (Mansfield, H. H. Richardson, Dark, White, and others), and it considers how the shape of modernism appears different if viewed from an antipodean perspective. It also considers various neglected modernist writers (Cunard, Farrell, Powell, Slessor, R. D. FitzGerald) and suggests how their modernist idiom becomes more recognizable in relation to an aesthetics of backwardness and burlesque.