Book at Lunchtime: Celebrity Culture and the Myth of Oceania

An intriguing case study on how popular images of Oceania, mediated
through a developing culture of celebrity, contributed to the
formation of British identity both domestically and as a nascent
imperial power in the eighteenth century. At the end of the
eighteenth century metropolitan Britain was entranced by stories
emanating from the furthest edge of its nascent empire. In the
experience of eighteenth-century Britain, Oceania was both a real
place, evidenced by the journals of adventurers like Joseph Banks,
the voyage books of Captain James Cook and the growing collection
of artefacts and curiosities in the British Museum, and a realm of
fantasy reflected in theatre, fashion and the new phenomenon of
mass print. In this innovative study Ruth Scobie shows how these
multiple images of Oceania were filtered to a wider British public
through the gradual emergence of a new idea of fame - commodified,
commercial, scandalous - which bore in some respects a striking
resemblance to modern celebrity culture and which made figures such
as Banks and Cook, Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers on
Pitcairn Island into public icons. Bringing together literary
texts, works of popular culture, visual art and theatrical
performance, Scobie argues that the idea of Oceania functioned
variously as reflection, ideal and parody both in very local
debates over the problems of contemporary fame and in wider
considerations of national identity, race and empire.