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.
“‘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)
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