Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature
CIRCLING THE VOID

PAUL SHARRAD

Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void by University of Wollongong professor Paul Sharrad, is the first full-length study of important Pacific writer Albert Wendt and his work.

Albert Wendt is by far the most prolific and most influential of the contemporary Pacific Island writers. He has written at least four books of poetry &endash; the latest, The Book of the Black Star (AUP, 2002), a groundbreaking collection of "imagetexts", three collections of short stories, five novels, a verse play and he has edited three anthologies of Pacific writing.

Paul Sharrad's book is the first extended study of this important writer and is an excellent introduction to Wendt's work designed for students and general readers. There is an introduction to Pacific Literature as a whole and Wendt's Samoan background. Chapters offer readings of all Wendt's major texts in chronological sequence, relating them to his essays, to literary movements of the time and to key motifs from Polynesian culture. There is an extensive bibliography of works by Albert Wendt and of critical responses to it.

Setting Wendt's achievement in the context of Pacific culture, contemporary writing and post-colonial discourse, Sharrad traces the archival sources of his themes and key influences and presents a chronological treatment of all Wendt's major works, including some early, little known material. He is interested in the imaginative power that drives them but also in the way in which they draw deeply on indigenous tradition while expressing at the same time the discontinuities, ambiguities and subversions of the postmodern consciousness.

Pacific literature is now being taught in Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Canada, France, Germany, the UK and throughout the Pacific Islands. This book, a much-needed addition to the critical resources in this growing field, will be an invaluable aid for readers, researchers, teachers and students of Pacific writing and postcolonial studies in general.

Published in association with Manchester University Press.

Contents

List of plates/maps

Preface

Maps

Chronology

1. Introduction

Context: Pacific Literature

Life and themes

Context: Samoa

Critical framework and responses

2. Works: Early to 1976

Sons for the Return Home

Flying-fox in a Freedom Tree

Inside us the Dead

3. Works: Middle to 1986

Pouliuli

Leaves of the Banyan Tree

Shaman of Visions

Birth and Death of the Miracle Man

4. Works: The nineties

Ola

Black Rainbow

Photographs

5. Conclusions

Bibliography

Index

About the author

Dr Paul Sharrad is Associate Professor, English Studies, at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, where he teaches Postcolonial Literatures with special interests in the Pacific and India.

A former secretary of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Languages and Literature Studies, he has taught at the National University of Singapore, has been a research fellow at the East&endash;West Center, Honolulu and a Visiting Fellow at Dijon's University of Bourgogne and at the Centre for Pacific Island Studies, Honolulu. Dr Sharrad has been a research associate for the Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English at Flinders University and is a member of the Identity and Cultural Difference (ICD) research program of the University of Wollongong's Institute for Social Change and Critical Inquiry.

Paul Sharrad is well-known for his comparative studies in his areas of special interest and has written widely on the work of Samoan/New Zealand author Albert Wendt and Maori writer Witi Ihimaera. His previous books include Raja Rao and Cultural Tradition (1987), and several that he has edited such as Readings in Pacific Literature (Wollongong, 1993) and, most recently, Self, Life, Writing (Dangaroo, 2001). He co-edits New Literatures Review and has been the editor of the CRNLE Reviews Journal. He has published many articles in leading journals on English-language writing from/about India, Australia, South-East Asia, and the Pacific.

He was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1949 and currently lives in New South Wales, Australia.

For more about Albert Wendt see: http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/wendt/
http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Wendt.html or
http://www.nzbookcouncil.org.nz/

September 2003, 248 x 148mm, 320p, paperback, illustrations, 1 86940 303 7, $44.99. New Zealand & Australian rights only.