The Rise of Pacific Literature: Decolonization, Radical Campuses, and Modernism

Winner, 2025 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize

Winner, 2025 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Shortlisted, 2025 Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize

In the 1960s and 1970s, the staff and students of two newly founded universities in the Pacific Islands helped foster a golden age of Oceanian literature. At the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of the South Pacific, bold experiments in curriculum design recentered literary studies around a Pacific modernity. Rejecting the esta...