The South Seas charts the idea of the South Seas in popular cultural productions of the English-speaking world, from the beginnings of the Western enterprise in the Pacific until the eve of the Pacific War. Building on the notion that the influences on the creation of a text, and the ways in which its audience receives the text, are essential for understanding the historical significance of particular productions, Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon explore the ways in which authors’ and producers’ ideas about the South Seas were “haunted” by others who had written on the subject, and how they in turn influenced future generations of knowledge producers. The South Seas is unique in its examination of an array of cultural texts. Along with the foundational literary texts that established and perpetuated the South Seas tradition in written form, the authorsexplore diverse cultural forms such as art, music, theater, film, fairs, platform speakers, surfing culture, and tourism.

Roslyn Jolly is Lecturer in English at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the author of Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction (OUP, 1993).

Richard Parkinson's Thirty Years in the South Seas was first published in 1907. In this 900-page work, Parkinson drew together and expanded on the scientific and popular papers he had been publishing since 1887, creating in the process a landmark ethnography of the Bismarck Archipelago. Parkinson moved to New Britain in 1879, only seven years after the first trader had established himself in the area. Over the next thirty years, he employed many local people on the family's expanding plantations, and travelled widely in the area, trading for produce (especially coconuts), observing traditional life, and buying artefacts for museums in Europe, USA and Australia. His travels covered the islands now known as New Britain, New Ireland, New Hanover, Manus, Buka and Bougainville, but he also collected information about the mainland of New Guinea (Kaiser Wilhelmsland). His observations covered a wide range of topics, from religious life and ceremonies to artefacts and language. It is clear he talked extensively with people - though mostly with a translator - and compared accounts. He also took many photographs, some 200 of which were included in the volume. Given the period, all his human subjects had to be posed, but the range of associated detail, probably unconsciously included, is substantial. What is particularly important about this work is the period in which it was written. While Parkinson may never have been the first contact of any local people, he was clearly among the first, and observed many societies before they were extensively incorporated into the Western economy, or missionised. Thirty Years in the South Seas is unparalleled in the literature of the Bismarck Archipelago. It is an incomparable picture of a time and place now long past.

The violence, wonder, and nostalgia of voyaging are nowhere more vivid than in the literature of South Seas exploration. Preserving the Self in the South Seas charts the sensibilities of the lonely figures that encountered the new and exotic in terra incognita. Jonathan Lamb introduces us to the writings of South Seas explorers, and finds in them unexpected and poignant tales of selves alarmed and transformed. Lamb contends that European exploration of the South Seas was less confident and mindful than we have assumed. It was, instead, conducted in moods of distraction and infatuation that were hard to make sense of and difficult to narrate, and it prompted reactions among indigenous peoples that were equally passionate and irregular. Preserving the Self in the South Seas also examines these common crises of exploration in the context of a metropolitan audience that eagerly consumed narratives of the Pacific while doubting their truth. Lamb considers why these halting and incredible journals were so popular with the reading public, and suggests that they dramatized anxieties and bafflements rankling at the heart of commercial society.

Reproduction of the original: South-Sea Idyls by Charles Warren Stoddard

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

This particular Jack London collection mirrors the incredible adventurous life of the author, it shows all the things he witnessed and experienced on his travels. Besides being a novelist, journalist and social activist – Jack London was also a railroad hobo, gold prospector, sailor, an oyster pirate, rancher, war correspondent... Novels The Cruise of the Dazzler A Daughter of the Snows The Call of the Wild The Sea-Wolf White Fang Burning Daylight Adventure The Scarlet Plague A Son of the Sun The Abysmal Brute The Mutiny of the Elsinore Jerry of the Islands Michael, Brother of Jerry Hearts of Three Short Stories Son of the Wolf The White Silence The Son of the Wolf The Men of Forty Mile In a Far Country To the Man on the Trail The Priestly Prerogative The Wisdom of the Trail The Wife of a King An Odyssey of the North The God of His Fathers: Tales of the Klondike The God of His Fathers The Great Interrogation Which Make Men Remember Siwash The Man with the Gash Jan, the Unrepentant Grit of Women Where the Trail Forks A Daughter of the Aurora At the Rainbow's End The Scorn of Women Children of the Frost In the Forests of the North The Law of Life Nam-Bok the Unveracious The Master of Mystery The Sunlanders The Sickness of Lone Chief Keesh, the Son of Keesh The Death of Ligoun Li Wan, the Fair The League of the Old Men The Faith of Men & Other Stories A Relic of the Pliocene A Hyperborean Brew The Faith of Men Too Much Gold The One Thousand Dozen The Marriage of Lit-lit Bâtard The Story of Jees Uck Tales of the Fish Patrol White and Yellow The King of the Greeks A Raid on the Oyster Pirates The Siege of the "Lancashire Queen" Charley's Coup Demetrios Contos Yellow Handkerchief Lost Face South Sea Tales The House of Pride & Other Tales of Hawaii Smoke Bellew The Red One On the Makaloa Mat Dutch Courage & Other Stories Memoirs The Road The Cruise of the Snark Through The Rapids on the Way to the Klondike From Dawson to the Sea Our Adventures in Tampico