Introduction

Abstract

Reading Across the Pacific is the first book-length study of literary and cultural engagement between the United States and Australia from a contemporary interdisciplinary perspective. Previous studies have been specialised, un- or under-theorised, and spoke to a narrowly bilateral context. Reading Across the Pacific, by contrast, is fully enmeshed in contemporary methodological debates: it does not just link the United States and Australia in a one-to-one dialogue but brings in the ambient circumstances of the Pacific Rim and Oceania. Importantly, it participates in a clearly identified ‘transnational turn’ in the study of both American and Australian literatures to which it is designed as a both a response and a provocation.