Fifty years ago one of the truisms of academic studies of literary modernism was an emphasis on how modern aesthetics disrupted progressive teleologies of time, thwarting a bourgeois, melioristic sense that things were always improving. The more liberal strand of these analyses made analogies to post-Einsteinian physics and, as Paul Giles mentions, to books like J. W. Dunne’s 1927 Experiment with Time, which, in its day, provoked “wide popular interest” (182). The more conservative strand—or, as in the case of John W. Harrison’s Reactionaries (1966), the strand more concerned about conservatism—noted how the antiprogressive temporalities of figures such as T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound fed their sympathies with right-wing, restorationist, or downright fascist political projects.These visions of a disruptive modernism have faded in the twenty-first century. Not just an itself increasingly residual postmodernism but dissident, postcolonial, and queer models of temporality have made the entire paradigm seem quaint. Moreover, the redefinition of the field from modernist literature to modern-period studies has opened the canon to works or authors modernist enough in technique. Now the modern period is like earlier literary periods, where people study what seems interesting without ignoring materials—as scholars of the baroque, say, never—even if they do not participate in a dominant aesthetic.This new constellation has made the old antitemporality debates recede a bit. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth’s Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (1992) might well be the last book to seriously address them. To make the temporality issue relevant again with respect to modern-period studies, they would probably have to be coupled with an expansion of the modern-period canon. That is just what Giles has done in Backgazing by insisting that Australian literature matters to modernity.Australian literature was traditionally excluded from the global Romantic and realist “clubs” in the nineteenth century on the grounds of being too peripheral, not good enough, but from the global modernist “club,” rather, for being behind the times. This was particularly true of poetry, where R. D. Fitzgerald, Kenneth Slessor, and A. D. Hope, though very different poets, all relied on rhyme and meter and seemed to lack the iconoclastic unconventionality of the canonical moderns. Their exclusion resonates deeply because of the stereotype that anything from Australia must be behind the times, even if it was beneath the same sky as its metropolitan counterparts. Australians have often explored this issue from the vantage point of what the post–World War II critic A. A. Phillips called the cultural cringe. Giles counters with a double argument: first, these poets were in fact up-to-date—as to argue otherwise would be, in the formulation made famous by Johannes Fabian, to deny them coevality—and second, whatever dyschronicity is asserted correlates with the spatial reorientation of the antipodean condition: if Australia can invert metropolitan space, it can also reverse metropolitan time.Giles’s previous books constitute one of the major arguments for the globalization of American literary studies. He has argued that American culture is not autochthonous by positioning such discourses as those of Britishness, Catholicism, and the antipodean as more proximate to the American orbit than critical tradition had assumed. Backgazing is Giles’s first major work to focus outside the United States. In one aspect of the book, pointing out the underexplored Australian side of modernism, he continues the task undertaken in 2013’s Antipodean America, where he examined how Australasian references helped constitute American literature. But in Backgazing’s exploration of temporality, Giles ventures into a more philosophical mode. He takes on questions of the avant-garde, the chronometrics of formal models, and the rhetoric of a “perpetual return” that “informs all aspects of modern consciousness” (205). Giles is sure-handed and comprehensive and will never miss a trick in terms of a possible angle of analysis, yet he is also open to the piercing epiphany, the startling insight; he is the rare critic in whom assiduity and brilliance can coexist. Though he is not a trained Australianist, he knows more about Australian literature than many who are; the only mistake in the book is that the maiden name of Amy Parker in Patrick White’s Tree of Man is Fibbens, not “Fibben” (248). Backgazing is both a comprehensive reframing of Anglophone modernism as such and a persuasive argument that Australian literature pertains far more directly to the modern than our academic fetishes have maintained. Giles makes this clear in his opening pages, when he states that his goal in comparing the poetries of Slessor and Eliot is both to “elucidate the global compass of an antipodean modernist poet” and to reveal the “antipodean, burlesque” elements of Eliot’s poetry (4). Giles not only makes connections both conceptually and materially. He points out, for instance, that Eliot was a great supporter of Frederic Manning, the Australian writer whose Her Privates We is considered the great Australian chronicle of World War I. Giles takes his title from the poetry of Fitzgerald, whose “retrogressive idiom” is also “relativistic” (115), and he nimbly argues for a double reorientation in space and time that remedies the exclusion of the Australian from the expanding sphere of world modernity. This argument is at its strongest when chronological time is accorded true double billing, as a variable, with geographic space. Giles cites Hope’s poem “A Letter from Rome,” which pictures the Venerable Bede visiting the Eternal City from the England of the eighth century, “fresh from a land as barbarian as mine” (140). By understanding the marginality of Australia as not just spatially peripheral but analogous to how England itself was in a time when it was a less developed country, a poet of conservative beliefs and style such as Hope can yet engage in as radical an act of overturning. This practice is not confined to the written word, for Giles includes some photographs of Max Dupain that show an Australian present not just in the twentieth century but within a larger conceptual idea of modernity.Giles produces daring formulations alongside often quite thought-provoking overviews of many sorts of writers known in different ways. Giles recognizes the Australian novelist Eleanor Dark (1901–85) as an artistic peer of Virginia Woolf but also argues that Dark’s organicist vision of history brings her closer to fascism in style, if not stance, than her leftist surface politics would admit. He thus can draw a connection between her experimental novels of modern inner life and her historical novels of white conquest of the indigenous people in a way that previous Dark scholarship struggled to do. Giles unexpectedly but inductively compares Dark with James T. Farrell and shows common traits between them even though Farrell’s Studs Lonigan books reached a wider readership. On other works, such as Djuna Barnes’s play The Antiphon, his scholarship, though not only cogent but ideal for orienting a beginning graduate student, does not stray beyond the expected. One of his few disappointing readings is that of the British novelist Anthony Powell (1905–2000). Giles recognizes Powell’s work as crucially enmeshed with problematics of time and modernity. But he castigates Powell as an upper-class snob in a way redolent of the meritocratic hegemony of Leavisism. In fact, Powell’s origins were less upper-class in British terms than the Bloomsbury of Virginia Woolf or the Australian background of Patrick White, a product of the New South Wales rural gentry. Still, a more provocative reading of Powell might have gotten in the way of the book’s overall argument. In general, Giles makes field-upending arguments while maintaining a comprehensible purview that is clearly enunciated and easily understood. To fundamentally reorient while also pleasingly articulate is the golden mean of interpretive criticism, and Giles has more than achieved that here.Backgazing puts Australia onto the map of global modernism while resurrecting the issue of modernist time for the twenty-first century. It does so with a sweep, an authority, and a scrupulousness of attention that readers have come to expect from the superb work of Paul Giles.