Georg forster in tahiti: Enlightenment, sentiment and the intrusion of the South Seas

Abstract

Reading German world traveller Georg Forster's influential A Voyage Round the World (1777), this essay discusses the typical conflict between Enlightenment ideology of progress and civilisation, which assigns Oceanian culture to a lower development stage, and the sentimental praise of the island Tahiti as the earthly paradise. Challenging the interpretive method of controlling coloniser and passive colonised, this essay stresses the real-world significance of Oceania in the transformation of Forster's cultural identity as it is manifested in his travel narrative. Hence Forster's travel account is less a distortion of Pacific history than a pivotal documentation of cultural transformation around 1800. © 2011 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.