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.

Linda M. Austin explores the ways in which scientific questions about the relation between human beings and automata, raised by the 'new psychology' of the late nineteenth century, forced the re-examination of creativity in literature, photography, ballet, and high-level mental activities.

What is style, and why does it matter? This book answers these questions by recovering the concept of 'stylistic virtue,' once foundational to rhetoric and aesthetics but largely forgotten today. Stylistic virtues like 'ease' and 'grace' are distinguishing properties that help realize a text's essential character. First described by Aristotle, they were integral to the development of formalist methods and modern literary criticism. The first half of the book excavates the theory of stylistic virtue during its period of greatest ascendance, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when...