Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2025 -

In light of a recent paradigm shift to Indigenous and transpacific studies, The Rise of Pacific Literature, by Long (Univ. of Waikato, New Zealand) and Hayward (The Univ. of the South Pacific, Fiji), offers a unique perspective on the formation and development of Pacific literature. Rather than focusing on local culture and form exclusively, the two authors begin by examining the influence of canonical British and American modernist authors such as Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Hemingway, Wright, and Ellison on the formation and flowering of Pacific literature. Moreover, influenced by example of Albert Wendt (the scholarly grandfather of Pacific literature), the authors further explore how the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of the South Pacific have played a crucial role in developing the curriculum for the training of Pacific authors and educators, providing physical and intellectual spaces for the production of Oceanic writing and facilitating transnational connections that would share decolonial and Indigenous thinking among authors from Oceania, Africa, and South Asia. It is precisely through appropriation of modernist techniques and negotiation with institutional arrangement that Pacific Islander authors have articulated their Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and subjectivities and developed their own visions and versions of modernism.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

This monograph is an engrossing introduction to classical Chinese poetry through 29 translations of a single poem, "Seeing Off a Friend," by Li Bai (Li Po), the great Tang poet (701-62). The translations were done by 29 poets from Ezra Pound (1915) to Red Pine (Bill Porter, 2003). Li Bai is considered to be China's most beloved poet. This book could also be called "29 ways of understanding a single poem." The scholars' presentations constitute an introduction to the distinct richness of the oldest unbroken poetic tradition in the world. Each translation is discussed by an eminent scholar. The epilogue is a model of close reading that unfolds the artistry of each translation within its historical period. This little book is excellent both as a model of close reading and a celebration of the qualities of classical Chinese literature.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduates through faculty.