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Beyond Hostile Islands: The Pacific War in American and New Zealand Fiction Writing

Online ISBN:
9781531507527
Print ISBN:
9781531505158
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Beyond Hostile Islands: The Pacific War in American and New Zealand Fiction Writing

Daniel McKay
Daniel McKay

Associate Professor

New Mexico Military Institute
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Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
2 April 2024
Online ISBN:
9781531507527
Print ISBN:
9781531505158
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

Beyond Hostile Islands examines five of the most significant historical and thematic areas associated with the Pacific War: island combat, economic competition, internment, imprisonment, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout, the central issues pivot around the question of how or whether at all New Zealand fiction writing differs from that of the United States. Can a sense of islandness, the “tyranny of distance,” Māori cultural heritage, or the political legacies of the nuclear-free movement provide grounds for distinctive authorial insights? As an opening gambit, Beyond Hostile Islands puts forward the term “ideological coproduction” to describe how a territorially and demographically smaller national culture may accede to the essentials of a given ideology while differing in ways that reflect the historical and provincial dimensions that are important to it. Appropriately, the literary texts under examination are set in a wide variety of locales, including Bougainville, Kwajalein Atoll, New Mexico, Ontario, and the Solomon Islands, among others. The book concludes with a deliberately open-ended pose, in the full expectation that literary writing on the Pacific War will grow in range and richness, aided in turn by the growth of Pacific Studies as a research area.

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