Description
“‘Who is … the Proust of the Paphuans?’, Saul Bellow infamously inquired, as if this vast expanse were too small, scattered and backward to deserve consideration. In response to this challenge, Pacific Gateways seeks to define a new (if provisional) canon. This diverse, insightful and compelling collection applies ethnographic perspectives (contact zone, participant-testimony, indigeneity) to a diverse range of genres (romance, travelogue, memoir) to demonstrate how the Pacific already prefigures and generates later networks of global exchange. It offers not retrospect into a distant past, but intimations of possible futures, as a portal into alternative forms of planetary consciousness.” (Steve Clark)
This book explores the entanglements of Anglophone literature with Pacific geographies, histories, and cultures during the long nineteenth century, giving a transpacific context to Victorian writers including Dickens, Kingston, Stevenson, and Trollope, and setting them alongside Pacific Rim writers such as Bret Harte, Lafcadio Hearn, Joseph Heco, and Yei Theodora Ozaki. The chapters focus upon the physical and imaginative “gateways” produced by Western technology,
including the port city, the steamship, telegraph lines, and the networks of international trade and finance. These Pacific gateways shape the development of a “transpacific consciousness” in Anglophone literature, whose modes of exchange and patterns of thought can still be seen in modern-day attitudes to the region. The book aims to present a polyglot and cross-cultural history of Anglophone literature in the Pacific, in which Anglo-American imperialism coexists with
established intra-Asian networks.
Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License via link.springer.com
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Pacific Gateways: Trans-Oceanic Anglophone Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century.- Section 1: Geopolitics of the Pacific.- Chapter 2: Island Logic, Continent Logic: The travelogues and fictions of the First Opium War.- Chapter 3: An Aesthetic Gateway to Japan: Mount Fuji and the Steamship Arrival in British Travel Writing, 1880–1900.- Chapter 4: Travel Writing on the Date Line: Claiming Lost Days in the Late Nineteenth Century.- Chapter 5: We’ll give up old China and live in Japan: George Grossmith’s Cups and Saucers (1876) and Britain’s Pacific Realignments in the 1870s”.- Chapter 6: Footnotes to History: Marginalizing Polynesia in Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Song of Rahéro’ and ‘The Feast of Famine’ (1890).- Section 2: Port Interactions and Intermediaries.- Chapter 7: Contact Nodes: Ports, Connection, and the World in Anthony Trollope’s Australia and New Zealand (1873) and The Way We Live Now (1875).- Chapter 8: Seeking Safe Harbour: W. H. G. Kingston’s Pacific Adventure Novels.- Chapter 9. Mutual Interests: Pacific Expansionism and the Reception History of Townsend Harris in Japan and America, 1856–1959.- Chapter 10: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Demystification of the Pacific Copra Trade.- Section 3: Transpacific Identities.- Chapter 11: San Francisco Chinatown as a Romantic Gateway: Transpacific (Dis)continuity in Bret Harte’s ‘Wan Lee, the Pagan’ (1876).- Chapter 12: Literary Diplomacy: Yei Theodora Ozaki, Early Anglo-Japanese Writing, and Transnational Female Networks.- Chapter 13: Joseph Heco’s Autobiographical Abjection.- Chapter 14: Robinson Crusoe as a Transpacific Novel: Hospitality, Recognition, Translation.
