Pacific Islands Writing
Subtitle: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania (Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Oxford University Press
Published: November 2, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9780199276455
Subjects: Literary studies: from c 1900 -; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; Australasia; Asian - General; Literary Criticism & Collections / Asian; History and criticism; Pacific Island literature
Description: Pacific Islands Writing offers a broad-ranging introduction to the postcolonial literatures of the Pacific region. Drawing upon metaphors of oceanic voyaging, Michelle Keown takes the reader on a discursive journey through a variety of literary and cultural contexts in the Pacific, exploring the Indigenous literatures of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, and also investigating a range of European or Western writing about the Pacific, from the adventure fictions of Herman Melville, R. L. Stevenson, and Jack London to the Pakeha European settler literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand. The book explores the relevance of 'international' postcolonial theoretical paradigms to a reading of Pacific literatures, but it also offers a region-specific analysis of key authors and texts, drawing upon Indigenous Pacific literary theories, and sketching in some of the key socio-historical trajectories that have inflected Pacific writing.