In:Travel Writing and Cultural Transfer
Edited by Petra Broomans and Jeanette den Toonder
[FILLM Studies in Languages and Literatures 20] 2024
► pp. 62–80
Chapter 3The temporalities of cultural transfer
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific travel writing
Published online: 1 November 2024
https://doi.org/10.1075/fillm.20.03san
https://doi.org/10.1075/fillm.20.03san
Abstract
This chapter analyses forms and functions of cultural transfer in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific travel
writings with a particular focus on the temporalities of cultural exchanges. It examines the multiple timeframes of cultural
transfer so as to open up a perspective on Stevenson’s works as negotiating not only the ambiguities of geographical but also
of time-based contact zones, where past, present and future meet. Such an exploration adds a temporal perspective to Mary
Louis Pratt’s term of the ‘contact zone’ insofar as it suggests that asymmetrical relationships cannot only arise out of
intercultural geographical spaces but can also result from inner-cultural encounters with different periods and times. Ghost
imagery and the narration of loss are part of the aesthetic repertoire Stevenson uses in his work to mediate the temporalities
of cultural contact zones. Together with other forms of cultural transfer, such as linguistic translation, the construal of
the traveller-narrator as intermediary figure and anthropological depictions of Pacific cultures, ghost images and tropes of
loss illustrate the complex chronotopical entanglements of cultural encounters that Stevenson negotiates in his Pacific
writings. Stevenson’s A Footnote to History (1892) and In
the South Seas (1896) offer rich resources for understanding the
temporal complexities of cultural transfer because, during his time in the Pacific, Stevenson was deeply occupied with the
multiple temporalities of cultures and cultural contact zones.
Article outline
- Travel writing as cultural mobiliser
- The temporalities of cultural transfer
- Conclusion
Notes References
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