Literary Culture and the Pacific

Literary Culture and the Pacific
Author: Vanessa Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 1998-01-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521573597

This 1998 book examines a range of nineteenth-century European accounts from the Pacific, depicting Polynesian responses to imported metropolitan culture, in particular its technologies of writing and print. Texts designed to present self-affirming images of 'native' wonderment at European culture in fact betray the emergence of more complex modes of appropriation and interrogation by the Pacific peoples. Vanessa Smith argues that the Pacific islanders called into question the material basis and symbolic capacities of writing, even as they were first being framed in written representations. Examining accounts by beachcombers and missionaries, she suggests that complex modes of self-authorization informed the transmission of new cultural practices to the Pacific peoples. This shift of attention towards reception and appropriation provides the context for a detailed discussion of Robert Louis Stevenson's late Pacific writings.

Inside Out

Inside Out
Author: Vilsoni Hereniko
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 454
Release: 1999
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780847691432

In a time of dynamism and contradiction in Pacific cultural production, a time of 'turning things over' and 'writing from the inside out, ' this far-reaching volume provides a comprehensive set of essays and interviews on the emergent literatures of the New Pacific. With its dynamic combination of important position papers, polemics, and decolonizing critiques by noted authors and of analysis by new and established post-colonial scholars, this volume exposes 'the maze and mix of literatures and cultural identities breaking down and building up across the Pacific Ocean.' This pioneering work will be the definitive resource for anyone researching or teaching Pacific literature and will be invaluable for bringing Pacific culture to readers outside the region

Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory

Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory
Author: Rey Chow
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2001-01-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822380161

These groundbreaking essays use critical theory to reflect on issues pertaining to modern Chinese literature and culture and, in the process, transform the definition and conceptualization of the field of modern Chinese studies itself. The wide range of topics addressed by this international group of scholars includes twentieth-century literature produced in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China; film, art, history, popular culture, and literary and cultural criticism; as well as the geographies of migration and diaspora. One of the volume’s provocative suggestions is that the old model of area studies—an offshoot of U.S. Cold War strategy that found its anchorage in higher education—is no longer feasible for the diverse and multifaceted experiences that are articulated under the rubric of “Chineseness.” As Rey Chow argues in her introduction, the notion of a monolithic Chineseness bound ultimately to mainland China is, in itself, highly problematic because it recognizes neither the material realities of ethnic minorities within China nor those of populations in places such as Tibet, Taiwan, and post–British Hong Kong. Above all, this book demonstrates that, as the terms of a chauvinistic sinocentrism become obsolete, the critical use of theory—particularly by younger China scholars whose enthusiasm for critical theory coincides with changes in China’s political economy in recent years—will enable the emergence of fresh connections and insights that may have been at odds with previous interpretive convention. Originally published as a special issue of the journal boundary 2, this collection includes two new essays and an afterword by Paul Bové that places its arguments in the context of contemporary cultural politics. It will have far-reaching implications for the study of modern China and will be of interest to scholars of theory and culture in general. Contributors. Stanley K. Abe, Ien Ang, Chris Berry, Paul Bové, Sung-cheng Yvonne Chang, Rey Chow, Dorothy Ko, Charles Laughlin, Leung Ping-kwan, Kwai-cheung Lo, Christopher Lupke, David Der-wei Wang, Michelle Yeh

The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture

The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture
Author: Steve Mentz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2016-11-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317016599

During the nineteenth century, British and American naval supremacy spanned the globe. The importance of transoceanic shipping and trade to the European-based empire and her rapidly expanding former colony ensured that the ocean became increasingly important to popular literary culture in both nations. This collection of ten essays by expert scholars in transatlantic British and American literatures interrogates the diverse meanings the ocean assumed for writers, readers, and thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic during this period of global exploration and colonial consolidation. The book’s introduction offers three critical lenses through which to read nineteenth-century Anglophone maritime literature: "wet globalization," which returns the ocean to our discourses of the global; "salt aesthetics," which considers how the sea influences artistic culture and aesthetic theory; and "blue ecocriticism," which poses an oceanic challenge to the narrowly terrestrial nature of "green" ecological criticism. The essays employ all three of these lenses to demonstrate the importance of the ocean for the changing shapes of nineteenth-century Anglophone culture and literature. Examining texts from Moby-Dick to the coral flower-books of Victorian Australia, and from Wordsworth’s sea-poetry to the Arctic journals of Charles Francis Hall, this book shows how important and how varied in meaning the ocean was to nineteenth-century Anglophone readers. Scholars of nineteenth-century globalization, the history of aesthetics, and the ecological importance of the ocean will find important scholarship in this volume.

The Path of the Ocean

The Path of the Ocean
Author: Marjorie Sinclair
Publisher:
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1982
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

Includes folk poetry from Hawaii, Samoa, Tonga, the Society Islands, the Tuamotus, the Marquesas, Easter Island, Mangareva, Cook Islands, Tuvalu, Kapingamarangi, Tikopia, and New Zealand.

Chinese Reportage

Chinese Reportage
Author: Charles A. Laughlin
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2002-10-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0822384124

Chinese Reportage details for the first time in English the creation and evolution of a distinctive literary genre in twentieth-century China. Reportage literature, while sharing traditional journalism’s commitment to the accurate, nonfictional portrayal of experience, was largely produced by authors outside the official news media. In identifying the literary merit of this genre and establishing its significance in China’s leftist cultural legacy, Charles A. Laughlin reveals important biases that impede Western understanding of China and, at the same time, supplies an essential chapter in Chinese cultural history. Laughlin traces the roots of reportage (or baogao wenxue) to the travel literature of the Qing Dynasty but shows that its flourishing was part of the growth of Chinese communism in the twentieth century. In a modern Asian context critical of capitalism and imperialism, reportage offered the promise of radicalizing writers through a new method of literary practice and the hope that this kind of writing could in turn contribute to social revolution and China’s national self-realization. Chinese Reportage explores the wide range of social engagement depicted in this literature: witnessing historic events unfolding on city streets; experiencing brutal working conditions in 1930s Shanghai factories; struggling in the battlefields and trenches of the war of resistance against Japan, the civil war, and the Korean war; and participating in revolutionary rural, social, and economic transformation. Laughlin’s close readings emphasize the literary construction of social space over that of character and narrative structure, a method that brings out the critique of individualism and humanism underlying the genre’s aesthetics. Chinese Reportage recaptures a critical aspect of leftist culture in China with far-reaching implications for historians and sociologists as well as literary scholars.

Living Kinship in the Pacific

Living Kinship in the Pacific
Author: Christina Toren
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2015-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1782385789

Unaisi Nabobo-Baba observed that for the various peoples of the Pacific, kinship is generally understood as “knowledge that counts.” It is with this observation that this volume begins, and it continues with a straightforward objective to provide case studies of Pacific kinship. In doing so, contributors share an understanding of kinship as a lived and living dimension of contemporary human lives, in an area where deep historical links provide for close and useful comparison. The ethnographic focus is on transformation and continuity over time in Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa with the addition of three instructive cases from Tokelau, Papua New Guinea, and Taiwan. The book ends with an account of how kinship is constituted in day-to-day ritual and ritualized behavior.

Indigenous Literatures from Micronesia

Indigenous Literatures from Micronesia
Author: Evelyn Flores
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2019-04-30
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0824877381

For the first time, poetry, short stories, critical and creative essays, chants, and excerpts of plays by Indigenous Micronesian authors have been brought together to form a resounding—and distinctly Micronesian—voice. With over two thousand islands spread across almost three million square miles of the Pacific Ocean, Micronesia and its peoples have too often been rendered invisible and insignificant both in and out of academia. This long-awaited anthology of contemporary indigenous literature will reshape Micronesia’s historical and literary landscape. Presenting over seventy authors and one hundred pieces, Indigenous Literatures from Micronesia features nine of the thirteen basic language groups, including Palauan, Chamorro, Chuukese, I-Kiribati, Kosraean, Marshallese, Nauruan, Pohnpeian, and Yapese. The volume editors, from Micronesia themselves, have selected representative works from throughout the region—from Palau in the west, to Kiribati in the east, to the global diaspora. They have reached back for historically groundbreaking work and scouted the present for some of the most cited and provocative of published pieces and for the most promising new authors. Richly diverse, the stories of Micronesia’s resilient peoples are as vast as the sea and as deep as the Mariana Trench. Challenging centuries-old reductive representations, writers passionately explore seven complex themes: “Origins” explores creation, foundational, and ancestral stories; “Resistance” responds to colonialism and militarism; “Remembering” captures diverse memories and experiences; “Identities” articulates the nuances of culture; “Voyages” maps migration and diaspora; “Family” delves into interpersonal and community relationships; and “New Micronesia” gathers experimental, liminal, and cutting-edge voices. This anthology reflects a worldview unique to the islands of Micronesia, yet it also connects to broader issues facing Pacific Islanders and indigenous peoples throughout the world. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Pacific, indigenous, diasporic, postcolonial, and environmental studies and literatures.

Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China

Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China
Author: Kai-wing Chow
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804733686

This path-breaking book argues that printing—both with woodblocks and with movable type—exerted a profound influence on Chinese society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.