Cart
Free US shipping over $10
Proud to be B-Corp

Literary Culture and the Pacific Vanessa Smith (King's College, Cambridge)

Literary Culture and the Pacific By Vanessa Smith (King's College, Cambridge)

Literary Culture and the Pacific by Vanessa Smith (King's College, Cambridge)


Summary

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. It focuses on texts by beachcombers and missionaries, and the late Pacific writings of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Literary Culture and the Pacific Summary

Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters by Vanessa Smith (King's College, Cambridge)

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.

Literary Culture and the Pacific Reviews

'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

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.

Additional information

NPB9780521573597
9780521573597
0521573599
Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters by Vanessa Smith (King's College, Cambridge)
New
Hardback
Cambridge University Press
1998-01-08
314
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a new book - be the first to read this copy. With untouched pages and a perfect binding, your brand new copy is ready to be opened for the first time

Customer Reviews - Literary Culture and the Pacific