| Chapter : | Introduction |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
of national and transnational affiliation depend on narrative patterns of attentiveness, relevance, perception, and recognition” and “[asserts] the often-invisible connections between personal and international experiences” (6). In so doing, she argues for a twentieth-century cosmopolitanism that might also accommodate Hazzard’s fiction:
These novels approach large-scale international events, such as world war and immigration, by focusing on the trivial or transient episodes of everyday life. One way to view these novels is to say that in focusing on the trivial and the transient, they are little occupied with political or international conditions. But one might observe, instead, that these novels are testing and redefining what can count as international politics: they may emphasize incidents that seem trivial in order to reject wartime values of order and proportion or they may emphasize what seem to be only personal experiences in order to expand what we know of global processes. (Walkowitz 10)
Through its diverse iterations, cosmopolitanism provides ways to re-engage “local” categories, such as the nation. Robert Dixon has explored the question of cosmopolitanism in relation to Australian literature, arguing that recent writing demonstrates
a marked contemporary interest in re-discovering the forms of cultural mobility and ethical authority once offered by historically earlier forms of cosmopolitanism. They recognize a value in what we might call “the negative relation to nationality,” insisting on the need for overlapping allegiances and multiple affiliations. (Dixon, “Cosmopolitanism” 68)
This is very close to the terrain that Hazzard opens up for contemporary readers through her complex configuration of time and space across her writing. In particular, Dixon’s account of what Graham Huggan (following Homi Bhabha) has termed “the temporal logic of national narrative” (Huggan 39) provides a productive way of addressing the shifting geographies of Hazzard’s fictional worlds and biographical habitus through its focus on the temporalised nature of these transnational