Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist B ...

stayed there. When we came out of that corner, you might say, we went and got married. (Gordan and Pasca 47)

The Hazzard–Steegmuller marriage was the subject of an exhibition held by the New York Society Library in 2010, and in the exhibition catalogue French scholar Richard Howard describes the marriage as “a conjugal version of literary high life” (Bartlett et al. 31). Poet and editor Jonathan Galassi recalls not only the deep personal and social generosity of both Hazzard and Steegmuller but also the glamour of their world, seen from Galassi’s perspective, that of an aspiring translator, first as “a world entirely beyond my reach” and in hindsight, more completely, as a community that represented “a particular, now historical ethos, dedicated to internationalism, liberal democracy and a broad and deep familiarity with intellectual and artistic greatness” (Bartlett et al. 7).

Shirley Hazzard’s work proposes for her readers the question of what it means for a writer to work self-consciously outside the terrain of the nation, in full recognition of the absence of patria as a point of vitality, determining a very particular imaginative geography. I have already suggested that the cosmopolitan dimension of Hazzard’s work is closely linked to humanism, which provides, she argues, a point of “fragile continuity” in western culture. I now consider how the particular mobility engendered by her cosmopolitanism takes shape as an account of the contemporary world informed by a temporally complex and mobile sense of its limits and frames. The concept of cosmopolitanism has in recent years been interrogated and revived by literary and cultural critics, generating a new analytics of worldliness and ethical specificity in the face of the mobile international, global parameters of the modern world. In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva has traced the historical imperative presented by the question of the foreigner in modernity, drawing on Kant’s understanding of cosmopolitanism and the ius cosmopoliticum as a postrevolutionary federation that “includes all the peoples of the world” (172). More recently, Rebecca Walkowitz has proposed a modernist cosmopolitan novel that “[imagines] that conditions