The Rise of Pacific Literature

Autorentext
Maebh Long is senior lecturer in English at the University of Waikato. She is the author of Assembling Flann O'Brien (2014) and editor of The Collected Letters of Flann O'Brien (2018).

Matthew Hayward is senior lecturer in literature and acting head of the School of Pacific Arts, Communication, and Education at the University of the South Pacific.

Long and Hayward are coinvestigators of the Oceanian Modernism project and coeditors of New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific (2019).

Klappentext

Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward identify the local innovations and international networks that spurred Pacific literature's golden age by reading crucial works against the poetry, prose, and plays on the syllabi of the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of the South Pacific.

Zusammenfassung
In the 1960s and 1970s, the staff and students of two newly founded universities in the Pacific Islands helped foster a golden age of Oceanian literature. At the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of the South Pacific, bold experiments in curriculum design recentered literary studies around a Pacific modernity. Rejecting the established British colonial model, writer-scholars placed Pacific oratory and a growing body of Oceanian writing at the heart of the syllabus. From this local core, students ventured outward to contemporary postcolonial literatures, where they saw modernist techniques repurposed for a decolonizing world. Only then did they turn to foundational modernist texts, encountered at last as a set of creative tools rather than a canon to be copied or learned by rote.

The Rise of Pacific Literature reveals the transformative role and radical adaptations of global modernisms in this golden age. Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward examine the reading and teaching of Pacific oral narratives, European and American modernisms, and African, Caribbean, and Indian literature, tracing how Oceanian writers appropriated and reworked key texts and techniques. They identify the local innovations and international networks that spurred Pacific literature's golden age by reading crucial works against the poetry, prose, and plays on the syllabi of the new universities. Placing internationally recognized writers such as Albert Wendt, Subramani, Konai Helu Thaman, Marjorie Crocombe, and John Kasaipwalova alongside lesser-known authors of works published in Oceanian little magazines, this book offers a wide-ranging new account of Pacific literary history that tells a fresh story about modernism's global itineraries and transformations.

Inhalt
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Pacific Universities and Modernist Literature

1. Modernism, Pedagogy, and Pacific Writer-Scholars
2. Decolonizing the Literature Program, Generating the Niuginian Literary Scene
3. Traveling Editors and Indigenous Masks: The Teachings of Ulli Beier
4. Black Power and Pacific Existentialism: John Kasaipwalova and Russell Soaba
5. Preliminaries and Prologues: A National Scene in a Regional University
6. Mana on Campus: New Forms in Pacific Poetry and Prose
7. Subramani's Sugarcane Gothic: Haunting the Regional Dream
   Coda: The Stories of Multitudes to Come
   Notes
   Bibliography
   Index