Description
The artist William Hodges accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage to the South Pacific in 1772-5. His extraordinarily vivid images, read against the fascinating journals of Cook and his companions, reveal as much about European cultures and historiography as about the peoples they visited. In this lively and original book, Harriet Guest discusses Hodges's dramatic landscapes and portraits alongside written accounts of the voyages and in the context of the theories of civilisation which shaped European perceptions - theories drawn from the works of philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment such as Adam Smith and John Millar. She argues that the voyagers resorted to diverse or incompatible models of progress in successive encounters with different groups of islanders, and shows how these models also structured metropolitan views of the voyagers and of Hodges's work. This fully illustrated study offers a fresh perspective on eighteenth-century representations of gender, colonialism and exploration.
An original and richly illustrated study of the pictorial and written representations of Cook's voyages.
About the Author
Harriet Guest is Professor of English in the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York.
Reviews
'Guest offers a series of fascinating and carefully nuanced readings of textual and visual representations of the South Pacific. ... Guest is as acute and informed an art historian as she is a literary critic, and the interdisciplinary approach is one of the book's great strengths. ... A truly interdisciplinary study, Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation should find its way onto the bookshelves and into the bibliographies of historians, art historians, and literary critics of the eighteenth century.' H-Albion
'Guest deftly brings together the often rapidly-changing political background of the late eighteenth century with developments in art, literature and philosophy, exploring their complex interplay. ... the Epilogue shows Guest at her finest.' Vanessa Collingridge, University of Glasgow
Book Information
ISBN 9780521881944
Author Harriet Guest
Format Hardback
Page Count 270
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 800g
Dimensions(mm) 253mm * 183mm * 18mm
An original and richly illustrated study of the pictorial and written representations of Cook's voyages.
About the Author
Harriet Guest is Professor of English in the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York.
Reviews
'Guest offers a series of fascinating and carefully nuanced readings of textual and visual representations of the South Pacific. ... Guest is as acute and informed an art historian as she is a literary critic, and the interdisciplinary approach is one of the book's great strengths. ... A truly interdisciplinary study, Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation should find its way onto the bookshelves and into the bibliographies of historians, art historians, and literary critics of the eighteenth century.' H-Albion
'Guest deftly brings together the often rapidly-changing political background of the late eighteenth century with developments in art, literature and philosophy, exploring their complex interplay. ... the Epilogue shows Guest at her finest.' Vanessa Collingridge, University of Glasgow
Book Information
ISBN 9780521881944
Author Harriet Guest
Format Hardback
Page Count 270
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 800g
Dimensions(mm) 253mm * 183mm * 18mm
