Book Review of "The Rise of Pacific Literature: Decolonization, Radical Campuses, and Modernism" by Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward. New York, Columbia University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780231217446
Bradshaw, Wayne (2026) Book Review of "The Rise of Pacific Literature: Decolonization, Radical Campuses, and Modernism" by Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward. New York, Columbia University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780231217446. Affirmations: of the modern. (In Press)
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Abstract
[Extract] Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward might seem to be chancing their hand with just how far the category of modernism can be stretched with The Rise of Pacific Literature: Decolonization, Radical Campuses, and Modernism. The work they discuss in this book was largely published between 1960 and 1990—challenging even the most generous periodisation of modernist writing—and was written far from centres of industrial modernisation, primarily by poets and novelists living in Papua New Guinea and Fiji. There is, however, justification in identifying the Pacific writing considered here as distinctly modernist and not merely modern. While the book does, as one might expect in the age of the new modernist studies, “position Oceanian writing within an extended history of global modernism,” it pushes further than this, providing a well-considered examination of the ways in which the teaching of modernist literature in the Pacific helped to produce a writing scene that was ambiguously modernist in character.[1] At the heart of The Rise of Pacific Literature is the story of two university English programs and the impact of pedagogy on the development of postcolonial literary identity.
| Item ID: | 91343 |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Article (Book Review) |
| ISSN: | 2202-9885 |
| Keywords: | Modernism, Pacific literature, Pedagogy |
| Copyright Information: | Copyright 2026 The Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. |
| Date Deposited: | 05 May 2026 04:47 |
| FoR Codes: | 45 INDIGENOUS STUDIES > 4513 Pacific Peoples culture, language and history > 451311 Pacific Peoples literature, journalism and professional writing @ 50% 47 LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE > 4705 Literary studies > 470507 Comparative and transnational literature @ 50% |
| SEO Codes: | 13 CULTURE AND SOCIETY > 1302 Communication > 130203 Literature @ 100% |
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