Gothic and the Pacific Voyage

Before the era of missionaries and settlement, before the erotic and exotic imaginary of Stevenson and Gauguin, there were the fantasies and wild expectations of South Seas utopias and savage paradises. In Gothic and the Pacific Voyage, Stephanie Smith-Browne shows how British and European travellers to the South Seas and the Antarctic were styled as Gothic chivalric knights and the lands they sought as the last possible places on earth to find paradise. Smith-Browne examines what the emblematic European Goth was doing in the South Seas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She argues that Gothic tales, iconography and states of mind were not marginal but integral to early Pacific travel narratives: real travels, fantastic voyages and fictions set in both the actual and the mythic lands of the South Seas. This book explores the anthropological, historical and maritime narratives of the first Europeans to make extended contact with Pacific islanders (Wallis, Bougainville, Commerson, Cook, Sparrman, Johann and George Forster), the savage utopian fiction of Hildebrand Bowman, and the newly rediscovered, long-lost South Seas novel of Victorian Gothicist Wilkie Collins, Iolani.