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

and student politics in France (115–118), or British spy scandals (217), tracing the Cold War outlines of a new world then just emerging:

In America, a white man had been shot dead in a car, and a black man on a verandah. In Russia, a novelist had emerged from hell to announce that beauty would save the world. Russian tanks rolled through Prague while America made war with Asia. In Greece the plays of Aristophanes were forbidden, in China the writings of Confucius. (Transit 245)

The somewhat portentous, even elemental, gravity of its tone notwithstanding, this very recognisable politico-historical world frames the ethical and emotional dramas of Hazzard’s fictional protagonists. It meshes directly, moreover, with the public purchase of her nonfictional writings in terms of the specific circumstances of Cold War paradigms; indeed, Hazzard has addressed each of the events alluded to here in her nonfiction. This context is further inflected with the forms and figures of a larger cultural inheritance, its contours formed in The Great Fire not only by the new geographies of post-Hiroshima Japan and Civil War China but also by historical perspectives whereby past worlds are brought into the present through, for instance, the shared reading of the historical works of Gibbon and Carlyle by the young protagonists (Great Fire 34, 39–40) and through the metaphorics of the “great fire” itself. The Great Fire tellingly relocates narrative interest eastwards from Europe to Asia as the locus of contemporary global political events while continuing to inflect and inform these events with significance drawn from Europe’s classical past.

The references to the Cold War as it replaces or reconfigures colonialism at the centre of Hazzard’s cosmopolis provide a lens through which the contemporary world might be viewed at the points of its emergence and definition, according to Robert Dixon’s account of cosmopolitanism’s “temporal logic” (whereby metropolis and province are separated by a gap in time or are rendered simultaneous) and to the similar temporal shifts I noted earlier in the ways both Hazzard and her critics account for her expatriatism. The simultaneous cosmopolitanism