Literary culture and the Pacific : nineteenth-century textual encounters
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Bibliographic Information
Literary culture and the Pacific : nineteenth-century textual encounters
（Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture, 13）
Cambridge University Press, 2005
digital. 1st pbk. version
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 271-292) and index
Digitally printed 1st pbk. version 2005
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This 1998 book examines a range of nineteenth-century European accounts from the Pacific, depicting Polynesian responses to imported metropolitan culture, in particular its technologies of writing and print. Texts designed to present self-affirming images of 'native' wonderment at European culture in fact betray the emergence of more complex modes of appropriation and interrogation by the Pacific peoples. Vanessa Smith argues that the Pacific islanders called into question the material basis and symbolic capacities of writing, even as they were first being framed in written representations. Examining accounts by beachcombers and missionaries, she suggests that complex modes of self-authorization informed the transmission of new cultural practices to the Pacific peoples. This shift of attention towards reception and appropriation provides the context for a detailed discussion of Robert Louis Stevenson's late Pacific writings.
Table of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: acts of reading
- 1. 'A gift of fabrication': the beachcomber as bricoleur
- 2. Lip service and conversation
- 3. 'Other people's books': Stevenson's Pacific travels
- 4. Piracy and exchange: Stevenson's Pacific fictions
- 5. In the press of events: Stevenson's Pacific history
- Afterword: 'the impediment of tongues'
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index.
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