Representing the South Pacific

Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin

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by Rod Edmond

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published January 1998, 319 pages, cloth

ISBN 0521550548

This book examines how the South Pacific was represented by explorers, missionaries, travellers, writers and artists between 1767 and 1914. It draws on history, literature, art history, and anthropology in its study of different, often conflicting colonial discourses of the Pacific. Among its themes are the persistent mythmaking around the figure of Cook, the western obsession with Polynesian sexuality, tattooing, cannibalism and leprosy, the Pacific as a theatre for adventure, and as a setting for Europe's displaced fears of its own cultural extinction.