Facing the Pacific : Polynesia and the U.S. imperial imagination / Jeffrey Geiger.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Geiger, Jeffrey.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Imperialism--History--20th century.

Imperialism.

Public opinion--United States--History--20th century.

Public opinion.

Popular culture--United States--History--20th century.

Popular culture.

Imperialism in literature.

Imperialism in motion pictures.

Oceania--Relations--United States.

Oceania.

United States--Relations--Oceania.

United States.

Oceania--Foreign public opinion, American.

Oceania--In literature.

Oceania--In motion pictures.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (314 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, c2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The enduring popularity of Polynesia in western literature, art, and film attests to the pleasures that Pacific islands have, over the centuries, afforded the consuming gaze of the west-connoting solitude, release from cares, and, more recently, self-renewal away from urbanized modern life. Facing the Pacific is the first study to offer a detailed look at the United States' intense engagement with the myth of the South Seas just after the First World War, when, at home, a popular vogue for all things Polynesian seemed to echo the expansion of U.S. imperialist activities abroad.Jeffrey Geiger looks at a variety of texts that helped to invent a vision of Polynesia for U.S. audiences, focusing on a group of writers and filmmakers whose mutual fascination with the South Pacific drew them together-and would eventually drive some of them apart. Key figures discussed in this volume are Frederick O'Brien, author of the bestseller White Shadows in the South Seas; filmmaker Robert Flaherty and his wife, Frances Hubbard Flaherty, who collaborated on Moana; director W. S. Van Dyke, who worked with Robert Flaherty on MGM's adaptation of White Shadows; and Expressionist director F. W. Murnau, whose last film, Tabu, was co-directed with Flaherty.

Contents:

The garden and the wilderness : tropes of order and disorder

Idylls and ruins : Frederick O'Brien in the Marquesas

Searching for Moana : Frances Hubbard and Robert J. Flaherty in Samoa

The front and back of paradise : W.S. Van Dyke and MGM in Tahiti

The homoerotic exotic : from C.W. Stoddard to Tabu.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 28. Aug 2019)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 273-296) and index.

ISBN:

9780824862459

0824862457

9781435666320

1435666321

OCLC:

256470546