The Pacific Tale Short Fiction from 1890-1950

This book offers a genealogy of short fiction in English set in the Pacific and written by British, American, and Australian writers. Through its analysis of texts by non-Islander authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Becke, Jack London, W. Somerset Maugham, and James A. Michener, this book traces the rise of 'The Pacific Tale' as a popular genre. Exploring themes of masculinity and imperialism; traders, literary mapping and inter-racial relationships; plantation labour and racial taxonomies; tropical breakdown, missions and colonial illegitimacy, together with militarism, environmental destruction and the persistence of the trope of the Polynesian belle, this study highlights the role and agency of Pacific Islanders, despite the multiple fronts on which their cultures were impacted by colonial powers. It concludes with the moment when Pacific writers Albert Wendt and Epeli Hau‘ofa express that agency in their own fictions, moving beyond the tradition of the Pacific tale.

1. The Pacific Tale.- 2. Emptying the Imperial Romance: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide.- 3. Mapping, Mastery and Islander Women: The Traders’ Voice in Louis Becke’s By Reef and Palm.- 4. Jack London in the Solomons: Race, Labour and Melanesianism in South Sea Tales.- 5.  Late-Colonial Breakdown in the Tropics: W. Somerset Maugham’s The Trembling of a Leaf.- 6. The Pacific as Polynesian Belle: James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific and Military Occupation.- 7.  Beyond the Pacific Tale.

Mandy Treagus is Adjunct Associate Professor in Humanities at the University of Adelaide. She has published on contemporary Pacific literature and art, Australian literature, and literature and culture of the British colonial era. Her titles include Empire Girls: The Colonial Heroine Comes of Age, Changing the Victorian Subject and Anglo-American Imperialism and the Pacific: Discourses of Encounter. She is a settler of Welsh, Scottish and Cornish descent, and lives on the unceded lands of the Peramangk and Kaurna peoples in South Australia.