Unsettled Narratives: The Pacific Writings of Stevenson, Ellis, Melville and London

by Farrier; David

• ISBN13: 9780415979511
• ISBN10: 041597951X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-11-30
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

In the nineteenth-century Pacific, the production of a text of encounter occurred in tandem with the production of a settled space; asserting settler presence through the control of the space and the context of the encounter. Indigenous resistance therefore took place through modes of representation that 'unsettled' the text. This book considers the work of four Western visitors to the Pacific-Robert Louis Stevenson, William Ellis, Herman Melville, and Jack London-and the consequences for the written text and the experience of cross-cultural encounter when encounter is reduced to writing. The study proposes a strong connection between settling and writing as assertions of presence, and, by engaging a metaphor of building dwellings and building texts, the study examines how each writer manipulates the process of text creation to assert a dominant presence over and against the indigenous presence, which is represented as threatening, and extra-textual.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: The Written Pacific	1	(14)
``Talk languished on the beach'': The Possibility of Reciprocity in Robert Louis Stevenson's In the South Seas	15	(58)
``These words are so changed in a native's mouth'': Contested Frames in William Ellis's Polynesian Researches	73	(44)
``Typee or Happar?'': The Unsettling Narrative of Typee	117	(56)
``This is the Book I write'': Jack London's Strictly Limited Body	173	(54)
Conclusion: Ambivalence and Authorship	227	(6)
Notes	233	(32)
Works Cited	265	(8)
Index	273