The Pacific Ocean has long inspired literary imaginings of promising worlds, including Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. This book asks how literary writers imagine ocean futures more recently, providing a perspective on imagination and art in the context that the sweeping environmental changes are reshaping life possibilities in the Pacific. It looks at contemporary poetry, short stories, art, and journalistic writings from Australia, New Zealand, and Hawai‘i, among other sites, exploring their imaginative accounts of present life and futures in varied sites where people ... More

The Pacific Ocean has long inspired literary imaginings of promising worlds, including Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. This book asks how literary writers imagine ocean futures more recently, providing a perspective on imagination and art in the context that the sweeping environmental changes are reshaping life possibilities in the Pacific. It looks at contemporary poetry, short stories, art, and journalistic writings from Australia, New Zealand, and Hawai‘i, among other sites, exploring their imaginative accounts of present life and futures in varied sites where people live closely with environmental loss. These literary writings are crafted to offer relationships with the future that include hope, an awareness of the future as a site of openness and promise. Literary writers evoke hope not by turning away from the realities of environmental loss and damage but rather through attunement to the beings, commitments, and struggles of the present world and the futures that such a world might shape. Drawing together ecocriticism and theories of hope, this book makes an argument for hope as a creative and critical engagement with present and past environmental constraints, including myriad forms of loss. It also reflects on the critical approaches that hope as an analytic category opens up for the study of environmental literature. Through this category, the book develops a method for reading literary works as creative accounts of present life and futures that offer hope, among their modes of engagement with the ocean.