Author: Robert Dean Craig File Type: pdf Prior to 1500 A.D. the Polynesians were the most widely spread people on earth, having settled an area of the Pacific, the Polynesian Triangle, twice the size of the United States. In this first reference guide to the mythology of these Vikings of the Pacific, Craig reviews Polynesian legends, stories, gods, goddesses, and heroes in hundreds of alphabetical entries that succinctly describe both characters and events. His wide-ranging and thorough introduction sets the subject in its geographic, historical, anthropological, and linguistic contexts, offering an illuminating overview of the origin of the Polynesians as a distinct people and tracing their voyages and settlements from Indonesia to Malaysia, Tonga, Samoa, the Marquesas, the various islands of eastern Polynesia, including Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand. The introduction presents fascinating information on Polynesian navigational skills and the voyages themselves, as well as a chart that details the evolution of the thirty Polynesian languages and compares cognates from several of these languages. A simplified pronunciation guide and a selected list of Polynesian dictionaries andor grammars are provided for those interested in pursuing the richness of the Polynesian languages. This introductory survey gives readers the necessary background to understand the origin, development, and dispersion of the myths throughout the Pacific basin. The Dictionary of Polynesian Mythology is the result of many years of research. The individual entries were gleaned from nearly 300 sources in English, German, French, and Polynesian languages with the majority extracted from a number of primary sources that date generally in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The printed source materials for this volume are fully described and listed by geographical group, including Maori, Cook Islands, Tahitian, Marquesan, Hawaiian, Samoan, and Tongan. General collections that retell the Polynesian stories are also surveyed. The entries are alphabetically arranged by major mythological figure lesser characters can be located in the index. Short bibliographical citations--author, date, and page number--are included at the end of each main entry to direct readers to fuller information contained in the printed sources. An appendix provides valuable supplemental information on Polynesian gods and goddesses. This dictionary is sure to become a basic reference tool for libraries, students, and scholars of Pacific history and culture, as well as for courses in mythology, religion, and philosophy. **Review . . . Robert Craig has translated, authored, or edited several books and journals on Oceania. With the Dictionary, he has produced a scholarly work intended primarily for scholars and has filled a gap in the literature. Anthropologists, historians, mythologists, and other students of Pacific cultures will find this work well written, well documented, and worthwhile . . . this is a significant new work and is highly recommended for Pacific studies and comparative mythology collections.Reference Quarterly About the Author ROBERT D. CRAIG is Professor of History and Chairman of the Social Sciences Department at the Alaska Pacific University, Anchorage.

Author: Luca Somigli File Type: pdf In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the production of literary and cultural manifestoes enjoyed a veritable boom and accompanied the rise of many avant-garde movements.Legitimizing the Artistconsiders this phenomenon as a response to a more general crisis of legitimation that artists had been struggling with for decades. The crucial question for artists, confronted by the conservative values of the dominant bourgeoisie and the economic logic of triumphant capitalism, was how to justify their work in terms that did not reduce art to a mere commodity. In this work Luca Somigli discusses several European artistic movements decadentism, Italian futurism, vorticism, and imagism and argues for the centrality of the works of F.T. Marinetti in the transition from afin de siecledecadent poetics, exemplified by the manifestoes of Anatole Baju, to a properly avant-garde project aiming at a complete renewal of the process of literary communication and the abolition of the difference between producer and consumer. It is to this challenge that the English avant-garde artists, and Ezra Pound in particular, responded with their more polemical pieces. Somigli suggests that this debate allows us to rethink the relationship between modernism and post-modernism as complementary ways of engaging the loss of an organic relationship between the artist and his social environment. **