LITERARY CULTURE AND THE PACIFIC by Vanessa Smith ( 9780521573597 )

Item Details

Title:

LITERARY CULTURE AND THE PACIFIC
NINETEENTH-CENTURY TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS

By:

Format:

Hardback

List price:	£90.00
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ISBN 10:

0521573599

ISBN 13:

9780521573597

Publisher:

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

8 January, 1998

Series:

Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature & Culture No. 13

Pages:

314

Description:

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

Synopsis:

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.

Illustrations:

9 b/w illus. 1 map

Publication:

Imprint:

Cambridge University Press

Returns:

Returnable

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