Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters

by Vanessa Smith

• ISBN13: 9780521022989
• ISBN10: 0521022983
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-11-17
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This 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.