Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 13)

ISBN: 0521573599

Author: Smith, Vanessa

Condition: New

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.