Literary Culture and the Pacific Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters [Paperback]

This 1998 book examines nineteenth-century European accounts of contact and settlement in the Pacific, and Polynesian responses to technologies of writing and print.This 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 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.0This 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 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.0This 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.List of Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction: acts of reading; 1. 'A gift of fabrication': the beachcomber as bricoleur; 2. Ll‰