| Chapter : | Introduction |
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of Hazzard’s two major novels, The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, holds her readers suspended at a point that is temporally as well as spatially significant in two ways: it is the point of the formation of Hazzard’s readers’ own world in its micropolitical details, and it is at the same time insistently a mobile and shifting locus. By inflecting their present-day events and characters with informed, readerly reflection on past events, Hazzard’s novels compress their differentiated historical worlds into a minutely nuanced and worldly perspective from which readers proceed to encounter their own locations in their larger contexts, displaced from the stability of their present-day locations.
This displacement is produced by means of what Amanda Anderson has referred to as the “expanded world” generated by older forms of cosmopolitanism. Anderson further notes what she calls an “awkward elitism” at work in the older sense of the term: “it frequently advances itself as a specifically intellectual ideal,” depending on “a mobility that is the luxury of social, economic or cultural privilege” (“Cosmopolitanism” 268). This critically inflected and temporally complex cosmopolitanism, itself the product of an earlier century and an older world view, provides a way of addressing the cultural mobility that drives Hazzard’s account of Australia through a kind of disavowed expatriatism, locating itself in an expanded rather than a nationally circumscribed world. In other words, expatriatism in her writing is a figure that enacts the possibilities of, in particular, female agency (both fictional and biographical) and that is grounded in a shifting sense of time and place. Hazzard’s cosmopolitanism—its expanded world and the awkward elitism of the forms of cultural mobility it engenders—draws readers to encounter their own contemporary world from an unfamiliar perspective.
This can be seen most clearly in Hazzard’s writings on specific places. As well as her extensive commentary on Italy, Hazzard has written about Australia, less as a specific geographical and historical entity than as a particular point of modernity, a locus of late-modern mobility, with a particular relation to the humanist inheritances of western