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Part of
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 3
The temporalities of cultural transfer

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific travel writing

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.
Keywords: Robert Louis Stevenson, Pacific, cultural transfer, temporality, travel writing, A Footnote to History, In the South Seas
Article outline
  • Travel writing as cultural mobiliser
  • The temporalities of cultural transfer
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 November 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/fillm.20.03san
References (20)
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