The Rise of Pacific Literature

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

A unique perspective on the formation and development of Pacific literature...Essential.-- "Choice"

The Rise of Pacific Literature is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the roots of contemporary Pacific writing and its place in world literature. It honors our literary ancestors while charting new critical waters, embodying the spirit of ka mua ka muri--walking backward into the future--that animates so much of our creative work. Fa'afetai tele lava to the authors for this landmark contribution to Pacific literary scholarship.--Selina Tusitala Marsh, Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate and scholar

The Rise of Pacific Literature offers a remarkably rich history of the interplay between university English courses and creative writing communities over about fifteen crucial years in the history of Pacific literature. Long and Hayward's attention to the resonances that modernist literature may have taken on when taught within these programs of study gives us an entirely new story about the literary production enabled by modernism's entrance into the universities.--Laura Heffernan, author of The Teaching Archive: A New History of Literary Study

Long and Hayward's detailed account splendidly enriches the story of Pacific literature's development by revealing how particular students, teachers, groups, courses, and events in and around universities transformed this writing in a crucial period. The Rise of Pacific Literature is at once the most comprehensive history of its kind--a go-to resource for readers already well versed in the subject--and a valuable, lucid, and engaging introduction to Pacific literature for those otherwise unfamiliar with it.--Douglas Mao, editor of The New Modernist Studies

This book is a triumph. It illustrates how future work linking Indigenous literatures to modernism can and should be undertaken, particularly by non-Indigenous scholars. With deft and illuminating close readings, Long and Hayward convey the twists and turns--and reciprocal relationships--by which a genuinely local and significant literary culture emerged in Oceania.--Stephen Ross, coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms

About the Author

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).