Early Tahitian Poetics

Tahiti has a rich history of oral tradition. Early visitors to the island transcribed recitations of myth, battle address, and land description. Until now their poetic organization has remained unexplored. From a computationally assisted analysis, this book describes early use of meter and parallelism and speculates on manner of composition. It sheds light on a poetic style unanticipated for Polynesia and remarkable among world poetries.

The Path of the Ocean is the first anthology of representative Polynesian poetry to be offered as a book of poetry rather than as a ethnological or historical document. Guided primarily by literary taste, Marjorie Sinclair has gathered poems from many sources and from translations with many kinds of expertise. She has scrupulously edited the old translations, modernized where necessary, and in some cases has translated or adapted the poetry. The arrangement of the anthology is rough geographic. It begins with Hawaii and travels southward, sometimes to the east and sometimes to the west until finally New Zealand is reached. As the title suggests, a journey that conveys scope, complexity, and deep humanity of the poetic spirit of the Polynesians.

Rev. ed. of: The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics / Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, co-editors; Frank J. Warnke, O.B. Hardison, Jr., and Earl Miner, associate editors. 1993.

Whetu Moana is a historic work - the first anthology of contemporary indigenous Polynesian poetry in English edited by Polynesians.

Throughout his career, Henri Matisse used imagery as a means of engaging critically with poetry and prose by a diverse range of authors. Kathryn Brown offers a groundbreaking account of Matisse's position in the literary cross-currents of 20th-century France and explores ways in which reading influenced the artist's work in a range of media. This study argues that the livre d'artiste became the privileged means by which Matisse enfolded literature into his own idiom and demonstrated the centrality of his aesthetic to modernist debates about authorship and creativity. By tracing the compositional and interpretive choices that Matisse made as a painter, print maker, and reader in the field of book production, this study offers a new theoretical account of visual art's capacity to function as a form of literary criticism and extends debates about the gendering of 20th-century bibliophilia. Brown also demonstrates the importance of Matisse's self-placement in relation to the French literary canon in the charged political climate of the Second World War and its aftermath. Through a combination of archival resources, art history, and literary criticism, this study offers a new interpretation of Matisse's artist's books and will be of interest to art historians, literary scholars, and researchers in book history and modernism.

This volume of essays and translations analyzes the prodigious and wide-ranging output of Keijiro Suga. Based in Japan, Keijiro Suga's works are wide-ranging and multilingual. His volumes of poetry have been shortlisted for a range of poetry prizes, and he was awarded the 2011 Yomiuri Shinbun Prize for Travel writing. He has translated dozens of books and has authored or co-authored more than fifteen other books across various genres. He is, by his own introduction, a poet first, but is also a prolific book reviewer, an astute theorist, and an insightful critic. His presence and contributions have been profound in many countries around the globe.

Focusing on American culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, The Languages of Difference studies the pervasive and potent notion of the primitive - a notion with dubious colonialist backgrounds and intricate involvement with ideas of color and race, civilization and culture. Human difference and the relationship to the Other were highstakes issues both globally and within societies like the U.S., but this key defining term, the primitive, often provided only a crude amalgam of perceived difference, ethnic and personal bias, and indiscriminate classification of a variety of unfamiliar customs and characteristics. Its uses and significations, like the attitudes it projected, were various and changing.

First published in 2008. The people and life of Tahiti had sunk deeply into the heart of Calderon; but when he returned home, he deliberately postponed the book he intended to write, in order that he might recall the memory in due perspective. He left it incomplete, but there is a synopsis which shows how he meant to construct it, with the help of these the book has been brought to the shape in which it is now published. The reader will understand how the book inevitably shows unevenness, save for the chapters which had received the author's finishing touch.