Reading Across the Pacific is a study of literary and cultural engagement between the United States and Australia from a contemporary interdisciplinary perspective. The book examines the relations of the two countries, shifting the emphasis from the broad cultural patterns that are often compared, to the specific networks, interactions, and crossings that have characterised Australian literature in the United States and American literature in Australia.

In the 21st century, both American and Australian literatures are experiencing new challenges to the very different paradigms of literary history and criticism each inherited from the 20th century. In response to these challenges, scholars of both literatures are seizing the opportunity to reassess and reconfigure the conceptual geography of national literary spaces as they are reformed by vectors that evade or exceed them, including the transnational, the local and the global. The essays in Reading Across the Pacific are divided into five sections: 'National literatures and transnationalism', 'Poetry and poetics', 'Literature and popular culture', 'The Cold War', and 'Publishing history and transpacific print cultures'.