Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon's The South Seas: A Reception History from Daniel Defoe to Dorothy Lamour is an invaluable resource for scholars and students interested in the expanding field of Pacific studies within the broader field of American studies. While this study explores the “South Seas” in an anglophone imaginary rather than in American cultural productions alone, and the authors are quick to distinguish their project from Pacific history by noting that their object of study is an imagined projection of the Pacific in the form of “the South Seas” rather than an account of the “real” place and its peoples, it nevertheless provides a timely account of the discursive richness of American encounters with the South Pacific.

The South Seas opens with a clear delineation of its aims and methodology. As a “reception history,” it seeks to track the construction, dissemination, and perpetuation of “the South Seas” as a set of “ideas, images, and myths” throughout “the English-speaking world from the beginning of the Western enterprise in the Pacific in the sixteenth century to the eve of the Pacific War” (xii). As a cultural history, it synthesizes a vast array of sources from novels and films; to travelogues and ethnographic treatises; to letters, journals, and newspapers. Chapters are arranged chronologically, but loosely grouped by genre, in large part due to the dominance of particular cultural forms at particular historical moments. The first four chapters thus take novels and fictionalized travelogues as their points of departure, and Brawley and Dixon convincingly illustrate the ways in which fiction writing responded to and produced new representations of the South Seas by the visual artists, explorers, and ethnographers that were their contemporaries. Despite being bookended by the English Daniel Defoe and Scottish Robert Louis Stevenson, these chapters are oriented by the influence of such authors on artists and writers from the United States, and the responses generated by them.

From chapter 5 onwards the authors extend the geographical reach of their study to include Australia, taking in topics as diverse as Australia's imperialist aims in New Guinea, surf culture in Australia and the US, and the writers of the “Lost Generation” and the controversy around Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). The final four chapters (on the South Seas in American cinema) make for thoroughly engaging reading as the authors draw on the considerable archive they amassed in researching their previous book, Hollywood's South Seas and the Pacific War: Searching for Dorothy Lamour (2012). There is much exciting material here for scholars interested in the intersection of race, indigeneity, and gender to follow up and thus redress the lack of feminist or queer analysis in other studies of the region such as Paul Lyons's American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination (2005) and John Eperjesi's The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American Culture (2005).

The decision to include Australian texts and contexts alongside those from Europe and the US gives rise to a number of rich moments of transnational analysis, particularly in relation to “blackbirding” – the kidnapping and indenturing of Pacific peoples for labour in tropical northern Australia and in South America (80–81); tourism, “authentic” primitivism, and Native women's bodies (146, 164); and the consumption of cinematic representations of the South Seas, most significantly the reception of the story of the HMAV Bounty (1789) in both Australia and the US (215 ff.). However, further opportunities for the implications of such comparison are missed, though perhaps they are necessarily absent given the book's wide scope and authors' broad-brush approach. Most notably, Mark Twain's Following the Equator: A Journey around the World (1897; itself absent from the Bibliography) explicitly compares the “recruiting” of Pacific labourers to “slave-catching” (83) and Twain later draws parallels between the treatment of indigenous Australians and the terrorizing tactics in the American South (207–8). Similarly, the social Darwinist-influenced notion of the racial superiority of “Polynesian” to “Melanesian” peoples that the authors note in the works of Jack London (53) as well as several authors of “boys' own” adventure stories (67) had significant implications for the recognition not only of the claims to sovereignty but even of the very existence of First Peoples. The valorization of Polynesian over Melanesian peoples in the nineteenth century contributed to the recognition of Maori humanity and (albeit limited) sovereignty in New Zealand as opposed to the dismissal of Australian aborigines as a dying race and their lands as terra nullius (land belonging to no one) in Australia. Moreover, acknowledging Twain's satire, as Paul Giles does in Antipodean America (2014), might have opened up a more complex reading of London, whose South Sea Tales (1911) attempt a similarly satirical approach to the history of the region that illustrates London's awareness of the tall tales told about it along with his own vexed impressions of the colonial exploitation he encountered there. While I want neither to nitpick over the authors' readings of Twain, London, and others (they make clear that they are historians, not literary critics), nor to oversimplify what are significant differences in the Australian and New Zealand contexts, I do want to draw out the ways in which closer textual analysis might have added further depth to the undeniable breadth of this study. In particular, attention to genre reveals the ways in which many of the cited texts knowingly undermined South Seas myth-making even as they produced it.

Early in their introduction Brawley and Dixon make the claim that reception history is a mode of “bridg[ing] the gap” between history and literature (xii). The wide range of sources on display connects many of the dots that make up the richly and problematically imagined space of “the South Seas” and the book is thus an invigorating contribution to transnational area studies – American, Pacific, and Australian studies in particular. Yet it is the hope of this reviewer that readers of this book might be encouraged to mine that gap for the riches it may yield rather than seek to cross it.