South Seas Encounters ― Nineteenth-century Oceania, Britain, and America

South Seas Encounters examines several key types of encounters between the many-faceted worlds of Oceania, Britain and the United States in the formative nineteenth century. The eleven essays collected in this volume focus not only on the effect of the two powerful, industrialized colonial powers on the cultures of the Pacific, but the effect of those cultures on the Western cultural perceptions of themselves and the wider world, including understanding encounters and exchanges in ways which do not underemphasize the agency and consequences for all participating parties. The essays also provide insights into the causes, unfolding, and consequences for both sides of a series of significant ethnographic, political, cultural, scientific, educational, and social encounters.

This volume makes a significant contribution to increasing scholarly interest in Oceania’s place in British and American nineteenth-century cultural experiences. South Seas Encounters investigates these significant interactions and how they changed the ways that Oceanic, British, and American cultures reflected on themselves and their place in the wider world. Although unfolding in only one corner of the vast human community, the contested and uncertain ethnographic, political, cultural, scientific, and social encounters described in this volume represent a revealing moment for local identities, colonialism, modernity, and globalization.

Richard Fulton earned his Ph.D. in English from Washington State University in 1975; his dissertation focused on periodical criticism of poetry in the 1870s. He is now a retired Academic Vice President, former President of both the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and VISAWUS, former editor of VPR, and continuing Victorian scholar working on Victorian childhood and the late Victorian military. He is author of some one hundred articles and reviews on Victorian Studies topics; in 2013 he collaborated with Peter Hoffenberg in editing Oceania and the Victorian Imagination: Where all things are possible. He is currently working on a book examining the culture of boyhood in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.