Unsettled Narratives: The Pacific Writings of Stevenson, Ellis, Melville and London / Edition 1

by David Farrier

Overview

In the nineteenth-century Pacific, the production of a text of encounter occurred in tandem with the production of a settled space; asserting settler presence through the control of the space and the context of the encounter. Indigenous resistance therefore took place through modes of representation that ‘unsettled’ the text. This book considers the work of four Western visitors to the Pacific—Robert Louis Stevenson, William Ellis, Herman Melville, and Jack London—and the consequences for the written text and the experience of cross-cultural encounter when encounter is reduced to writing. The study proposes a strong connection between settling and writing as assertions of presence, and, by engaging a metaphor of building dwellings and building texts, the study examines how each writer manipulates the process of text creation to assert a dominant presence over and against the indigenous presence, which is represented as threatening, and extra-textual.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415979511
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/30/2006
Series:	Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Edition description:	ANN
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments. Introduction: The Written Pacific 1. 'Talk Languished on the Beach': The Possibility of Reciprocity in Robert Louis Stevenson’s In the South Seas 2. 'These Words are so Changed in a Native’s Mouth': Contested Frames in William Ellis’s Polynesian Researches 3. 'Typee or Happar?': The Unsettling Narrative of Typee 4. 'This is the Book I Write': Jack London’s Strictly Limited Body Conclusion: Ambivalence and Authorship. Notes. Works Cited. Index