Bookshelf: The golden age of Oceania writing: Linking Indigenous literatures to modernism

By Pacific Island Times News Staff

In the 1960s and 1970s, the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of the South Pacific redesigned and decolonized their curriculum. They replaced the established British colonial model with Pacific oratory and a growing body of Oceanian writing at the center of the syllabus.

Students ventured into contemporary postcolonial literature, where they observed modernist techniques repurposed for a decolonizing world. They found a set of creative tools rather than a canon to be copied or learned by rote.

The bold curricular experiment ushered in a golden age of Oceanian literature, highlighted in “The Rise of Pacific Literature,” which won the 2025 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, and the 2025 Choice Outstanding Academic Title.

Published in September 2024 by Columbia University Press, “The Rise of Pacific Literature” is a collection of writings by Oceanian authors, offering a wide-ranging new account of Pacific literary history that tells a fresh story about modernism’s global itineraries and transformations.

“The Rise of Pacific Literature” reveals the transformative role and radical adaptations of global modernisms in this golden age. Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward examine the reading and teaching of Pacific oral narratives, European and American modernisms, and African, Caribbean, and Indian literature, tracing how Oceanian writers appropriated and reworked key texts and techniques.

They identify the local innovations and international networks that spurred Pacific literature’s golden age by reading crucial works against the poetry, prose and plays on the syllabi of the new universities.

Long is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Waikato and author of Assembling Flann O’Brien (2014) and editor of The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien (2018). Hayward is a senior lecturer in literature and acting head of the School of Pacific Arts, Communication and Education at the University of the South Pacific.

Douglas Mao, editor of The New Modernist Studies, described “The Rise of Pacific Literature” as “the most comprehensive history of its kind—a go-to resource for readers already well versed in the subject—and a valuable, lucid and engaging introduction to Pacific literature for those otherwise unfamiliar with it.”

Stephen Ross, coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms, said the book illustrates how future work linking Indigenous literatures to modernism can and should be undertaken, particularly by non-Indigenous scholars.

“With deft and illuminating close readings, Long and Hayward convey the twists and turns—and reciprocal relationships—by which a genuinely local and significant literary culture emerged in Oceania,” he said.

Selina Tusitala Marsh, a poet from New Zealand, said the book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the roots of contemporary Pacific writing and its place in world literature.