When D. H. Lawrence wrote in Kangaroo, “You just walk out of the world and into Australia,” he expressed in 1923 a commonplace European view of the Antipodean nation as separate, different, perhaps incomprehensible, beyond civilization. Early in his remarkable study, Antipodean America, Paul Giles cites a different, equally dismissive observation by Lawrence: even when viewed from that “queer place,” California, the Pacific was “void” (23). Yet in Giles's pioneering study, the emerging nations of the South are not separate, exotic, vacant. Exploring “Australasia and the Constitution of U.S. Literature,” Giles rescues the Pacific fragments of Europe, both Australia and New Zealand, from dominant historical and literary paradigms that privilege national exceptionalism, cultural isolation, separate – and separating – historical trajectories. Giles's close textual reading of a vast literature uncovers in American perspectives a complex and contradictory upside down “America” situated, in Herman Melville's words, “on the other side of the Sphere.” Ironically, in tracing Australasian infiltrations and influences in American literature, Giles's own writing also inverts unequal North–South relationships, rendering them contradictory, fluctuating, topsy-turvy exchanges. Giles challenges interpretations that uncritically posit an enduring imbalance in cultural and intellectual relations between the dominant New World nation, the United States, and the much smaller Antipodean nations, Australia and New Zealand. He seeks to demonstrate persistent references across these Pacific cultures and reveals “the manifold ways in which Australasia has formed a shadow self in US national narratives, with the cultural histories of the two countries [sic] having long been imbricated within each other” (5). Giles uncovers in these exchanges a rich seam of material that, he asserts, impacted profoundly on American writers and writing from the very earliest years of European exploration, mapping and colonization of the Pacific and North America.

Paul Giles has written extensively on American (US) literature as a product of transatlantic and transnational intersections. His trilogy of works – Transatlantic Insurrections (2006), Atlantic Republic (2006) and, perhaps most significantly, The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011) – revealed the North American literary imagination in fascinating, original, historicized ways. Antipodean America is a welcome compliment to these important studies. In uncovering a largely unexplored transpacific literature, Giles successfully extends his bold scholarly project to “relocate US cultural geography transnationally,” remapping “American cultural history from a global perspective” (32–33).

Antipodean America is realized on a remarkably broad canvas, ranging across more than two centuries, two continents, and a vast literature – colonial, nationalist, postcolonial. The encyclopedic character of the book, and its length, invite readers to explore and revisit themes and writers independent of its wider trajectory. Giles signposts his study conveniently, so the reader is not swamped by overlapping detail, theory, or argument. It is organized around ten lengthy chapters that explore themes as diverse as the Founding Fathers and Austral Enlightenment, antebellum seascapes and the Southern Cross, empire upside down, and Antipodean American postmodernism. Some of the writers and texts given detailed consideration in each section are familiar voices in Australian – if not American – historiography and literary criticism that centre on transpacific borrowings and intersections, most notably the writing of John Dunmore Lang, Melville, Mark Twain, Anthony Trollope, and Jack London. Yet Giles also interrogates a range of writing much less cited in Australian or New Zealand literary history, uncovering surprising intersections between North America and its putative New World cousins. Central to this revisioning are the works of such seemingly disparate authors as Benjamin Franklin, John Ledyard, Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, John Boyle O'Reilly, Lola Ridge, Karl Shapiro, Raymond Chandler and, perhaps most unexpectedly, Salman Rushdie and J. M. Coetzee.

Despite its scope, Antipodean America is not a predictable historical survey of canonical literary texts. While it is – sensibly – built on a fairly conventional chronological structure, the writing analysed and the arguments pursued throughout reflect a refreshingly original endeavour. For example, early chapters explore, along with a variety of lesser-known writing, Franklin's early encounters with colonial “New Holland,” John Ledyard's narrative of his voyage on James Cook's Resolution to Australia and New Zealand, and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Enlightenment speculations on Americans as a “new race of men.” Giles finds in such texts an inchoate sense of place and nation informed less by “territorial enclosure,” insularity or exceptionalism than by relations with the wider world (62). In a related vein, his close readings of later nineteenth-century writers, including Poe, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, and Twain, reveal hidden Antipodean perspectives, imaginings of “other” Americas, as well as fascinating transpacific cultural synergies, ruptures and contradictions.

In Giles's confident study, surprising themes, tropes, arguments and textual juxtapositions emerge. His detailed reflections on Jack London's reports of extended travels in the South Pacific, for example, display themes evident throughout Giles's broad scholarly journey. Arriving in Sydney shortly after the much-celebrated visit of Theodore Roosevelt's Great White Fleet (1908), London's reports predictably embraced shared hierarchies of race and Anglo-Saxon heritage. Yet if London's racialism was unexceptional, he was simultaneously uncomfortable with Anglo-Australia's radical “Socialistic” political culture. London also wrote overtly of his sense of disorientation as a newcomer to Australia – a place “so different from other civilized countries.” In London's ambivalence towards “the idea of an Antipodean America,” Giles typically uncovers transpacific encounters that sharpened American ideas of nation and difference in new, often paradoxical and uncomfortable, ways. And, exemplifying one of the many strengths of his study, Giles situates his subject historically, locating London's reports from “outlying” Australia of the racially charged Burns–Johnson world heavyweight title fight within paradigms of modernization and globalization – “a world approaching global simultaneity at the beginning of the twentieth century” (281).

Some of Giles's preoccupations parallel – and are informed by – broad, fairly recent shifts in historiography and cultural studies. Past research has too often traced international cultural influences within nationalist frameworks of unequal power – including so-called soft power – and uncontested unidirectional influence. Giles appropriately dismisses such arguments, especially those betraying national anxieties about so-called “Americanization.” However, he is somewhat reluctant to acknowledge recent revisionist interpretations of international cultural transmission: interpretations that anticipate aspects of his discussion, as they too have emphasized cultural intersections, multidirectional influences, contradictions and diffusion, with the porous “nation” fragmenting and evolving within an incessantly interconnected world. Giles adapts and extends such scholarship, eschewing any single “theoretical framework,” predicating his discussion on what he terms “a critical transnationalism” that emphasizes cultural juxtapositions, overlaps, interference, and “circuitous engagement with global space” (37, 492).

Given Antipodean America's subtlety, range and exhaustive textual foundations, future scholarship cannot ignore Giles's claim – made boldly in the opening paragraph of his work – of the important if often indirect ways in which “the Southern continent of Australia has shaped the trajectory … of American literature from the late eighteenth century to the present” (3). Giles convincingly fulfils his aim to cast this literature in “a new light” (6). His work is as ambitious as it is original. Uniquely, Giles's exhaustive study reveals a complex of Antipodean influences on the broad historical arc of American literature. Yet, given the lingering strength of American (US) exceptionalism, and the resilience of cultural nationalism even in the face of accelerating globalization, it is likely that Giles's achievements will excite much less scholarly interest in the United States than in either of its smaller Antipodean cousins, Australia or New Zealand.