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Article Dans Une Revue International Journal of Scottish Literature Année : 2013

Scotsman’s Pacific

Résumé

If Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide, ‘The Isle of Voices’ and ‘The Bottle Imp’ revisit many South Sea stereotypes, they most often do so the better to discard them. Classical references to antiquity offer a pretext to search for new literary, political, social, religious and economic representations. When Paradise is regained in the Pacific, it may be Biblical no longer, but it may reflect indigenous cosmogony instead. The conventional representations of Noble and Ignoble Savages are boldly inverted, together with the Western gender, social and racial hierarchies that prevailed in the nineteenth century. The proposition of an inexorably moribund Pacific people is belied by indigenous male protagonists – a first in Pacific literature – who heroically revive the high deeds of their own ancestors, mythical and divine, and strive to combine modern and traditional cultures in the Pacific. Vahine are valiant heroines, the repositories of traditional values, and the harbingers of a brighter, cross-cultural future. Finally, Stevenson may be said to try and redefine his own identity as a story-teller in Samoa, by questioning the authoritative narrative voice of South Sea representations. In a remarkably postcolonial stance, true to the Oceanic ritual of the gift/counter-gift, Stevenson/Tusitala hands his narratives over for Other storytellers to speak and delineate their own shifting identities for themselves.45

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hal-01777635 , version 1 (25-04-2018)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01777635 , version 1

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Sylvie Largeaud-Ortega. Scotsman’s Pacific: shifting identities in R. L. Stevenson’s postcolonial fiction. International Journal of Scottish Literature, 2013, 9, p. 85-98. ⟨hal-01777635⟩
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