Literary Culture and the Pacific
Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters
Part of Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Author: Vanessa Smith, King's College, Cambridge
- Date Published: November 2005
- availability: Available
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9780521022989
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This book examines a range of nineteenth-century European accounts from the Pacific that depict Polynesian responses to imported metropolitan culture, in particular its technologies of writing and print and how they were appropriated and interrogated by Pacific peoples. Examining accounts by beachcombers and missionaries, and offering a detailed discussion of the late Pacific writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vanessa Smith argues that the texts of contact and settlement are shaped at least as much by local contexts as by the agendas of their European authors.
Read more- Interdisciplinary approach applying literary criticism to cultural accounts and situating literary texts within ethnographic context
- Contributes to debates about empire and colonialism, while shifting focus to the Pacific, relatively neglected in recent studies
- First book-length study to offer detailed, theoretically informed readings of Stevenson's Pacific writings, including unpublished manuscripts
Reviews & endorsements
"...Smith (King's College, Cambridge) has written an interesting analysis of European accounts of early contact with Pacific islanders." Choice
See more reviews"The book is an innovative and useful addition to the presently flourishing critical field of colonial and post/ neocolonial studies...Literary Culture and the Pacific offers a wealth of specific interpretive moments...excellent insights...an excellent bibliography...an original and valuable book." Modern Philology
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×Product details
- Date Published: November 2005
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9780521022989
- length: 316 pages
- dimensions: 229 x 154 x 29 mm
- weight: 0.485kg
- contains: 9 b/w illus. 1 map
- availability: Available
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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