SOUTH SEA YARNS


Book Description

Discover the fascinating culture and life of the South Seas with South Sea Yarns by Basil Thomson. Each tale is a vivid portrayal of the islands' unique customs, capturing the spirit and charm of the South Seas like never before. Thomson's exquisite storytelling skills transport readers to the heart of the South Seas, giving them a front-row seat to the adventures, beauty, and mysteries of this captivating region. Embark on a thrilling journey with South Sea Yarns by Basil Thomson. Order your copy today and let these captivating tales whisk you away to the enchanting South Seas.




South Sea Yarns


Book Description







South Sea Tales


Book Description

Roslyn Jolly is Lecturer in English at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the author of Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction (OUP, 1993).




Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson


Book Description

Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body is the first booklengthstudy about the influence of travel on RobertLouis Stevenson's writings, both fiction and nonfiction.Within the contexts of late-Victorian imperialism andethnographic discourse, the book offers original closereadings of individual works by Stevenson while bringingnew theoretical insights to bear on the relationshipbetween travel, authorship, and gender identity in theVictorian fin de siècle. Oliver S. Buckton develops "cruising" as a criticalterm, linking Stevenson's leisurely mode of travelwith the striking narrative motifs of disruption andfragmentation that characterize his writings. Bucktontraces the development of Stevenson's career from hisearly travel books to show how Stevenson's majorworks of fiction, such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, andThe Ebb-Tide, draw on innovative techniques and materialsStevenson acquired in the course of his globaltravels. Exploring Stevenson's pivotal role in the revivalof "romance" in the late nineteenth century, Cruisingwith Robert Louis Stevenson highlights Stevenson's treatmentof the human body as part of his resistance torealism, arguing that the energies and desires releasedby travel are often routed through disturbingly resistantor darkly comic corporeal figures. Buckton gives extensiveattention to Stevenson's writing about the SouthSeas, arguing that his groundbreaking critiques ofEuropean colonialism are formed in awareness of thefragility and desirability of Polynesian bodies and islandlandscapes. Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson will be indispensableto all admirers of Stevenson as well as of greatinterest to readers of travel writing, Victorian ethnography, gender studies, and literary criticism.




Strangers in the South Seas


Book Description

Long before Magellan entered the Pacific in 1521 Westerners entertained ideas of undiscovered oceans, mighty continents, and paradisal islands at the far ends of the earth. First set down by Egyptian storytellers, Greek philosophers, and Latin poets, such ideas would have a long life and a deep impact in both the Pacific and the West. With the discovery of Tahiti in 1767 another powerful myth was added to this collection: the noble savage. For the first time Westerners were confronted by a people who seemed happier than themselves. This revolution in the human sciences was accompanied by one in the natural sciences as the region revealed gaps and anomalies in the "great chain of being" that Charles Darwin would begin to address after his momentous visit to the Galapagos Islands. The Pacific produced similar challenges for nineteenth-century researchers on race and culture, and for those intent on exporting their religions to this immense quarter of the globe. Although most missionary efforts ultimately met with success, others ended in ignominious retreat. As the century wore on, the region presented opportunities and dilemmas for the imperial powers, leading to a guilty desire on the part of some to pull out, along with an equally guilty desire on the part of others to stay and help. This process was accelerated by the Pacific War between 1941 and 1945. After more than two millennia of fantasies, the story of the West’s fascination with the insular Pacific graduated to a marked sense of disillusion that is equally visible in the paintings of Gauguin and the journalism of the nuclear Pacific. Strangers in the South Seas recounts and illustrates this story using a wealth of primary texts. It includes generous excerpts from the work of explorers, soldiers, naturalists, anthropologists, artists, and writers--some famous, some obscure. It begins in 1521 with an account of Guam by Antonio Pigafetta (one of the few men to survive Magellan's circumnavigation voyage), and ends in the late 1980s with the writing of an American woman, Joana McIntyre Varawa, as she faces the personal and cultural insecurities of marriage and settlement in Fiji. It shows how "the Great South Sea" has been an irreplaceable "distant mirror" of the West and its intellectual obsessions since the Renaissance. Comprehensively illustrated and annotated, this anthology will introduce readers to a region central to the development of modern Western ideas. "This is a carefully conceived anthology covering an excellent range of subjects. The selections are well chosen and interesting, and the introductory materials are both scholarly and accessible. It should be widely used in university courses dealing with almost any aspect of the Pacific." —Rod Edmond, University of Kent at Canterbury







Robert Louis Stevenson


Book Description

Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries reinstates Stevenson at the center of critical debate and demonstrates the sophistication of his writings and the present relevance of his kaleidoscopic achievements. While most young readers know Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) as the author of Treasure Island, few people outside of academia are aware of the breadth of his literary output. The contributors to Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries look, with varied critical approaches, at the whole range of his literary production and unite to confer scholarly legitimacy on this enormously influential writer who has been neglected by critics. As the editors point out in their Introduction, Stevenson reinvented the “personal essay” and the “walking tour essay,” in texts of ironic stylistic brilliance that broke completely with Victorian moralism. His first full-length work of fiction, Treasure Island, provocatively combined a popular genre (subverting its imperialist ideology) with a self-conscious literary approach. Stevenson, one of Scotland’s most prolific writers, was very effectively excluded from the canon by his twentieth-century successors and rejected by Anglo-American Modernist writers and critics for his play with popular genres and for his non-serious metaliterary brilliance. While Stevenson’s critical recognition has been slowly increasing, there have been far fewer published single-volume studies of his works than those of his contemporaries, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.




An Old Sailor's Yarns


Book Description




Grass Huts and Warehouses


Book Description

A pioneering study of early trade and beach communities in the Pacific Islands and first published in 1977, this book provides historians with an ambitious survey of early European-Polynesian contact, an analysis of how early trade developed along with the beachcomber community, and a detailed reconstruction of development of the early Pacific port towns. Set mainly in the first half of the 19th century, continuing in some cases for a few decades more, the book covers five ports: Kororareka (now Russell, in New Zealand), Levuka (Fiji), Apia (Samoa), Papeete (Tahiti) and Honolulu (Hawai'i). The role of beachcombers, the earliest European inhabitants, as well as the later consuls or commercial agents, and the development of plantation economies is explored. The book is a tour de force, the first detailed comparative academic study of these early precolonial trading towns and their race relations. It argues that the predominantly egalitarian towns where Islanders, beachcombers, traders, and missionaries mixed were largely harmonious, but this was undermined by later arrivals and larger populations.




Recent Books