Author: Ann C. Colley Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351902776 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 372
Book Description
In her distinguished and hauntingly rendered book, Ann C. Colley provides a fresh insight into Stevenson's multi-voiced South Seas fiction, as well as into the particulars and complications of living within a newly established site of Empire. Bringing to light information from the archives of the London Missionary Society and from other sources, such as the Royal Geographical Society (London), the Writers' Museum (Edinburgh), the Beinecke Library (Yale University), and the Huntington Library (San Marino, California), Colley examines the intricate nature of Robert Louis Stevenson's relation to imperialism. In particular, she investigates Stevenson's complex relationship to the missionary culture that surrounded him during the last six years of his life (1888-1894), revealing hitherto unscouted routes by which to understand Stevenson's experiences while he was cruising among the South Sea islands, and later while he was a resident colonial in Samoa. Beginning with a history of the missionaries in the Pacific that reveals Stevenson's criticism of, yet ultimate support for, their work, and demonstrates how these attitudes helped shape his South Sea fiction, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination constitutes a major work of reconstruction from archival sources. Subsequent chapters focus on Stevenson's struggles with personal and cultural identity in the South Seas, and his interest in photography, panoramas, and magic lantern shows, revealing Stevenson's sensitivity to the ways light plays upon darkness to create meaning. In addition, Stevenson's serious commitment to political issues and his thoughts about power and nationhood are explored. Finally, Stevenson's recollections of his childhood are engaged not only to suggest an unacknowledged source (the juvenile missionary magazines) for A Child's Garden of Verses, but also to illuminate the generous reach of his imagination that exceeds the formulae of the missionary culture and the boundaries of the colonial construct.
Author: Ann C. Colley Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1351902784 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 228
Book Description
In her distinguished and hauntingly rendered book, Ann C. Colley provides a fresh insight into Stevenson's multi-voiced South Seas fiction as well as into the particulars and complications of living within a newly established site of Empire. Bringing to light information from the archives of the London Missionary Society, the Writers' Museum (Edinburgh), the Beinecke Library (Yale University), the Huntington Library (San Marino, California), and the Royal Geographical Society (London), Colley examines Stevenson's complex involvement with the colonial imagination. Her exploration of the missionary culture surrounding Robert Louis Stevenson during the last six years of his life (1888-1894) uncovers hitherto unscouted routes by which to understand Stevenson's multi-layered fiction as well as his experiences in the South Seas, both as a traveler and as a resident colonial in Samoa. This context offers a new and important approach to Stevenson's views on memory, alienation, power, class, and nationhood.
Author: Roslyn Jolly Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351902741 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
Robert Louis Stevenson's departure from Europe in 1887 coincided with a vocational crisis prompted by his father's death. Impatient with his established identity as a writer, Stevenson was eager to explore different ways of writing, at the same time that living in the Pacific stimulated a range of latent intellectual and political interests. Roslyn Jolly examines the crucial period from 1887 to 1894, focusing on the self-transformation wrought in Stevenson's Pacific travel-writing and political texts. Jolly shows how Stevenson's desire to understand unfamiliar Polynesian and Micronesian cultures, and to record and intervene in the politics of Samoa, gave him opportunities to use his legal education, pursue his interest in historiography, and experiment with anthropology and journalism. Thus as his geographical and cultural horizons expanded, Stevenson's professional sphere enlarged as well, stretching the category of authorship in which his successes as a novelist had placed him. Rather than enhancing his stature as a popular writer, however, Stevenson's experiments with new styles and genres, and the Pacific subject matter of his later works, were resisted by his readers. Jolly's analysis of contemporary responses to Stevenson's writing, gleaned from an extensive collection of reviews, many of which are not readily available, provides fascinating insights into the interests, obsessions, and resistances of Victorian readers. As Stevenson sought to escape the vocational straightjacket that confined him, his readers just as strenuously expressed their loyalty to outmoded images of Stevenson the author, and their distrust of the new guises in which he presented himself.
Author: Richard J. Hill Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317062167 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 388
Book Description
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text explores the genesis, production and the critical appreciation of the illustrations to the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson is one of the most copied and interpreted authors of the late nineteenth century, especially his novels Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. These interpretations began with the illustration of his texts in their early editions, often with Stevenson’s express consent, and this book traces Stevenson’s understanding and critical responses to the artists employed to illustrate his texts. In doing so, it attempts to position Stevenson as an important thinker and writer on the subject of illustrated literature, and on the marriage of literature and visual arts, at a moment preceding the dawn of cinema, and the rejection of such popular tropes by modernist writers of the early twentieth century.
Author: Barry Menikoff Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press ISBN: 9781570035685 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
Narrating Scotland traces the Scottish writer's weaving together of source material from memoirs, letters, histories, and records of trials. Barry Menikoff uncovers the documentary basis for reading Kidnapped and David Balfour as political allegories and reveals the skill with which Stevenson offered a narrative that British colonizers could enjoy without being offended by its underlying condemnation.
Author: Murfin Audrey Murfin Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 1474452019 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 239
Book Description
Explores Robert Louis Stevenson's collaborative processContains new readings of thirteen works by Robert Louis Stevenson, including several rarely discussedSheds light on connections between authorship, celebrity, the literary marketplace and the creative processSupported by extensive manuscript researchThis book investigates Stevenson's literary collaborations with family and friends as he travelled Scotland, America and the Pacific. With critical readings of both major and minor Stevenson texts, supported and contextualised by unpublished manuscripts and letters by both Stevenson and those he wrote with, this book argues that Stevenson's writings are both a product of and a meditation on collaborative writing. Stevenson's self-reflective body of work reimagines late-Victorian authorship by examining the ways that authors choose material, negotiate the marketplace and, ultimately, maintain power over their own words, or let that power go.
Author: Caroline McCracken-Flesher Publisher: Modern Language Association ISBN: 1603291857 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 247
Book Description
Although Robert Louis Stevenson was a late Victorian, his work--especially Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde--still circulates energetically and internationally among popular and academic audiences and among young and old. Admired by Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luis Borges, Stevenson's fiction crosses the boundaries of genre and challenges narrow definitions of the modern and the postmodern. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," provides an introduction to the writer's life, a survey of the criticism of his work, and a variety of resources for the instructor. In part 2, "Approaches," thirty essays address such topics as Stevenson's dialogue with James about literature; his verse for children; his Scottish heritage; his wanderlust; his work as gothic fiction, as science fiction, as detective fiction; his critique of imperialism in the South Seas; his usefulness in the creative writing classroom; and how Stevenson encourages expansive thinking across texts, times, places, and lives.
Author: Glenda Norquay Publisher: Anthem Press ISBN: 1785272861 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 315
Book Description
Robert Louis Stevenson, Literary Networks and Transatlantic Publishing in the 1890s investigates Stevenson and the geographies of his literary networks during the last years of his life and after his death. It profiles a series of figures who worked with Stevenson, negotiated his publications on both sides of the Atlantic, wrote for him or were inspired by him. Using archival material, correspondence, fiction and biographies it moves across these literary networks. It deploys the concept of ‘literary prosthetics’ to frame its analysis of gatekeepers, tastemakers, agents, collaborators and authorial surrogates in the transatlantic production of Stevenson’s writing. Case studies of understudied individuals and broader consideration of the networks they represent contribute to knowledge of transatlantic publishing in the 1890s, understanding of transatlantic culture, Stevenson studies, current interest in the workings of literary communities and in nineteenth-century mobility.
Author: Richard J. Hill Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1317062205 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 282
Book Description
In his travel narrative Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), Robert Louis Stevenson declares, "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move. " Taking up the concepts of time, place, and memory, the contributors to this collection explore in what ways the dynamic view of life suggested by this quotation permeates Stevenson's work. The essays adopt a wide variety of critical approaches, including post-colonial theory, post-structuralism, new historicism, art history, and philosophy, making use of the vast array of literary materials that Stevenson left across a global journey that began in Scotland in 1850 and ended in Samoa in 1894. These range from travel journals, letters, and classic literary staples such as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to rarely read masterpieces such as The Master of Ballantrae or The Ebb-Tide. While much recent scholarship on Stevenson foregrounds geography, the present volume also examines the theme of movement across memory, time, and generic boundaries. Taken together, the essays offer a view of Stevenson that demonstrates how the protean nature of his literary output reflects the radical developments in science, technology, and culture that characterized the age in which he lived.
Author: Richard Ambrosini Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press ISBN: 0299212238 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 410
Book Description
Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries reinstates Stevenson at the center of critical debate and demonstrates the sophistication of his writings and the present relevance of his kaleidoscopic achievements. While most young readers know Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) as the author of Treasure Island, few people outside of academia are aware of the breadth of his literary output. The contributors to Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries look, with varied critical approaches, at the whole range of his literary production and unite to confer scholarly legitimacy on this enormously influential writer who has been neglected by critics. As the editors point out in their Introduction, Stevenson reinvented the “personal essay” and the “walking tour essay,” in texts of ironic stylistic brilliance that broke completely with Victorian moralism. His first full-length work of fiction, Treasure Island, provocatively combined a popular genre (subverting its imperialist ideology) with a self-conscious literary approach. Stevenson, one of Scotland’s most prolific writers, was very effectively excluded from the canon by his twentieth-century successors and rejected by Anglo-American Modernist writers and critics for his play with popular genres and for his non-serious metaliterary brilliance. While Stevenson’s critical recognition has been slowly increasing, there have been far fewer published single-volume studies of his works than those of his contemporaries, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.
Author: Ann C. Colley
Author: Ann C. Colley
Author: Roslyn Jolly
Author: Richard J. Hill
Author: Barry Menikoff
Author: Murfin Audrey Murfin
Author: Caroline McCracken-Flesher
Author: Glenda Norquay
Author: Richard J. Hill
Author: Richard Ambrosini