Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters

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Cambridge University Press, 1998 M01 8 - 296 páginas
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.

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the beachcomber as bricoleur
18
Lip service and conversion
53
Stevensons Pacific travels
101
Stevensons Pacific fiction
145
Stevensons Pacific history
192
the impediment of tongues
235
Notes
244
Bibliography
271
Index
293
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