Mandy Treagus

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.

Short Fiction from 1890-1950

The Pacific Tale

Sharon Crozier-De Rosa

Maggie Tonki

Madeleine Seys

The essays in this collection examine how both colonial and British authors engage with Victorian subjects and subjectivities in their work. Some essays explore the emergence of a key trope within colonial texts: the negotiation of Victorian and settler-subject positions. Others argue for new readings of key metropolitan texts and their repositioning within literary history. These essays work to recognise the plurality of the rubric of the 'Victorian' and to expand how the category of Victorian studies can be understood.

Changing the Victorian Subject

The dominant form of the nineteenth-century novel was the Bildungsroman, a story of an individual’s development that came to speak more widely of the aspirations of nineteenth-century British society. Some of the most famous examples —David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre — validated the world from which they sprang, in which even orphans could successfully make their way. Empire Girls: the colonial heroine comes of age is a critical examination of three novels by writers from different regions of the British Empire: Olive Schreiner’sThe Story of An African Farm (South Africa), Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Daughter of Today (Canada) and Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom(Australia). All three novels commence as conventional Bildungsromane, yet the plots of all diverge from the usual narrative structure, as a result of both their colonial origins and the clash between their aspirational heroines and the plots available to them. In an analysis including gender, empire, nation and race, Empire Girls provides new critical perspectives on the ways in which this dominant narrative form performs very differently when taken out of its metropolitan setting.

Mandy Treagus

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