Unsettled Narratives: The Pacific Writings Of Stevenson, Ellis, Melville And London (literary Criticism And Cultural Theory) Paperback

India

David Farrier

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.

1138813931

9781138813939

English

Taylor & Francis Ltd

27 Apr 2015