Intimate Strangers

Vanessa Smith teaches in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters (1998) and co-editor of Exploration and Exchange: A South Seas Anthology 1680–1900 (2000) and Islands in History and Representation (2003).

• Introduction: amicable signs; Part I. Making Contact: 1. Crowd scenes; 2. Receiving strangers; 3. Calculated affection; 4. Performance anxieties; Part II. Particular Friendships: 5. Fellow traveling; 6. Ruinous friendships; 7. Prizeable companions.

''Friendship' looms large in stories of early encounters in the Pacific, but up until now has been unanalysed, and seemed unanalysable. This is a genuinely cross-disciplinary study, animated by an impressive understanding of anthropological sources and early voyage texts; it gives us a fresh understanding of foundational moments in the modern history of empire and global interaction.' Nicholas Thomas, University of Cambridge