Facing the Pacific : : Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination / / Jeffrey A. Geiger.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter UHP eBook Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Geiger, Jeffrey A.,
• Place / Publishing House: Honolulu : : University of Hawaii Press, , [2007]; ©2007
• Year of Publication: 2007
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (336 p.) :; 10 illus.
• Other title: Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; Introduction --; 1. The Garden and the Wilderness: Tropes of Order and Disorder --; 2. Idylls and Ruins: Frederick O'Brien in the Marquesas --; 3. Searching for Moana: Frances Hubbard and Robert J. Flaherty in Samoa --; 4. The Front and Back of Paradise: W. S. Van Dyke and MGM in Tahiti --; 5. The Homoerotic Exotic: From C. W. Stoddard to Tabu --; Afterword --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index --; About the Author
• Format: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9780824862459; 9783110564143; 9783110663259
• DOI: 10.1515/9780824862459
• Access: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Jeffrey A. Geiger.

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.