Literary Culture and the Pacific
Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters

This 1998 book examines nineteenth-century European accounts of contact and settlement in the Pacific, and Polynesian responses to technologies of writing and print.

Vanessa Smith (Author)

9780521022989, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 17 November 2005

316 pages, 9 b/w illus. 1 map
22.9 x 15.4 x 2.9 cm, 0.485 kg

'The work of theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Walter Ong are used with economy and precision to illuminate how the reception of missionary literature was astonishingly diverse.' The Times Literary Supplement

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]