The South Seas

A Reception History from Daniel Defoe to Dorothy Lamour

Sean Brawley, Chris Dixon

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780739193365
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Beginnings
• America’s South Seas
• Herman Melville’s Pacific Imaginings
• San Francisco, Art, and Robert Louis Stevenson
• Finding New Guinea
• The Colonial Endeavor and Australia’s South Seas
• The Fair, the Stage, and the Song
• The Great War and the Lost Generation
• A South Seas Education
• South Seas Tourism
• Hollywood Encounters the South Seas
• Cinematic Escapes
• HMAV Bounty and the Great Depression
• Pardon My Sarong
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors