Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters

ISBN-13: 9780521573597 / Angielski / Twarda / 1998 / 314 str.

Cambridge) Vanessa Smith (King's College

Opis

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.

Recenzje

'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

Spis treści

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.