SOURCE: “Opening Accounts in the South Seas: Poe's Pym and American Pacific Orientalism,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Vol. 42, No. 4, 1996, pp. 291-326.

In the following essay, Lyons examines the influence of several contemporary South Seas narratives on Pym, linking the whole genre with American colonial policy and expansionism.

Talking one day of a public discourse, Henry remarked, that whatever succeeded with the audience, was bad. I said, “Who would not like to write something which all can read, like ‘Robinson Crusoe’; and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment, which delights everybody.”

—Emerson, “Thoreau”

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Accounts of encounters with Pacific peoples in antebellum texts by Euro-Americans are marked and marred by anxiety. In discovery narratives, government documents, and popular fiction alike, the Pacific emerges as a theater in which regressive and deathly American fantasies of laissez-faire...