"While Captain James Cook's South Pacific voyages have been extensively studied, much less attention has been paid to his representation of the Pacific Northwest. In Constructing Colonial Discourse, N.E. Currie focuses on Cook's 1778 voyage to Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island." "Comparing the official 1784 edition of Cook's journal for that voyage with Cook's actual journal accounts, Currie demonstrates that the representation of North America's northwest coast in the late eighteenth century was shaped as much by the publication process as by British notions of landscape, natural history, cannibalism, and history in the new world. Most recent scholarship on imperialist representations of the non-European world takes these published accounts at face value. Constructing Colonial Discourse combines close textual analysis with the insights of postcolonial theory to critique the discursive and rhetorical strategies by which the official account of the third voyage transformed Cook into an imperial hero."--BOOK JACKET.