Reviews

"Scrupulously scholarly. Olubas's primary observations are laid down on vast tranches of secondary reading, and she situates Hazzard’s achievement within contemporary developments in literary theory. Nonetheless Olubas’s prose is lucid and, within the obligations of the academic context, elegant. Her work should be read by anyone with an interest in Hazzard or in cosmopolitanism more generally.” - The Australian

"Lucidly written, theoretically sophisticated, and scrupulously researched, Brigitta Olubas' account of Shirley Hazzard shows us just how this great cosmopolitan novelist has produced a body of work that lies outside and beyond 'terrain of the nation.'" – Michael Gorra, Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English, Smith College

“In this original and wide-ranging study, Brigitta Olubas demonstrates how the geographical and emotional vistas that open up to the young expatriate heroines of Hazzard’s fiction are located in relation to the critique of post-war modernity in her political writing.” – Sue Sheridan, Professor of English and Women's Studies, Flinders University

“This important new book by Brigitta Olubas will transform Australian literary studies by placing the work of an expatriate writer at the centre of the field. Throughout her career, Shirley Hazzard has consistently adopted a cosmopolitan perspective as the moral and political ground of her work, and of her own unique and utterly original style. Through nuanced readings of Hazzard’s novels, stories, non-fiction and occasional writings, Olubas demonstrates how the effects of cosmopolitan mobility, of the ‘negative relation to nation’, give Hazzard’s novels their power to displace her readers from their present locations in time and space. Theoretically sophisticated, critically subtle and insightful, this is the first comprehensive study of this major twentieth-century writer, putting Hazzard at the centre of a newly worlded, international vision of Australian literature.” – Robert Dixon, Professor of Australian Literature, University of Sydney