Full Description
The South Seas charts the idea of the South Seas in popular cultural productions of the English-speaking world, from the beginnings of the Western enterprise in the Pacific until the eve of the Pacific War. Building on the notion that the influences on the creation of a text, and the ways in which its audience receives the text, are essential for understanding the historical significance of particular productions, Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon explore the ways in which authors' and producers' ideas about the South Seas were "haunted" by others who had written on the subject, and how they in turn influenced future generations of knowledge producers. The South Seas is unique in its examination of an array of cultural texts. Along with the foundational literary texts that established and perpetuated the South Seas tradition in written form, the authorsexplore diverse cultural forms such as art, music, theater, film, fairs, platform speakers, surfing culture, and tourism.
Contents
Chapter 1: Beginnings: Defoe, Dampier, and Discovery
Chapter 2: America's South Seas
Chapter 3: Herman Melville's Pacific Imaginings
Chapter 4: San Francisco, Art, and Robert Louis Stevenson
Chapter 5: Finding New Guinea
Chapter 6: The Colonial Endeavor and Australia's South Seas
Chapter 7: The Fair, the Stage, and the Song
Chapter 8: The Great War and the Lost Generation
Chapter 9: A South Seas Education: Platform Speakers, National Geographic, and Margaret Mead
Chapter 10: South Seas Tourism
Chapter 11: Hollywood Encounters the South Seas
Chapter 12: Cinematic Escapes: The South Seas Adventure Film
Chapter 13: HMAV Bounty and the Great Depression
Chapter 14: Pardon My Sarong: The Arrival of Dorothy Lamour
