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.

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.

Table of Contents

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