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Counterpoint: Fanny’s and Louis’s Pacific Diaries

Audrey Murfin

in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration

This chapter the progression of several textual fragments describing Pacific islands that the Stevensons visited on the ship the Janet Nichol, from their first draft as holograph manuscript ... More

This chapter the progression of several textual fragments describing Pacific islands that the Stevensons visited on the ship the Janet Nichol, from their first draft as holograph manuscript fragments, to their inclusion in Fanny Stevenson’s published diary The Cruise of the Janet Nicoll [sic], and sometimes their inclusion in Louis’s published nonfiction in In the South Seas as well as fiction such as The Beach of Falesá. Much of this material, which was originally written by Louis but later claimed by Fanny, concerns one topic--that of the sexual exploitation of young Pacific Island girls by white traders. The shared nature of the family’s diaries allowed Louis to hide in his wife’s diary material on a topic that was evidently of great interest to him, but that would have negatively affected this very famous author’s reputation as a family-friendly author.Less

The Plot Against England: The Dynamiter

Julia Sun-Joo Lee

in The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel

The epilogue focuses on Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Stevenson's collection of stories, The Dynamiter (1885). Set against the Fenian dynamite bombings in London, The Dynamiter revises the slave ... More

The epilogue focuses on Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Stevenson's collection of stories, The Dynamiter (1885). Set against the Fenian dynamite bombings in London, The Dynamiter revises the slave narrative to expose England's dwindling moral authority in the late-Victorian period. This epilogue addresses the cultural durability of the American slave narrative in the years following the Emancipation Proclamation, while considering how issues of authorship and authenticity continued to haunt the genre into the late nineteenth century.Less

Collaboration and Marriage: The Dynamiter

Audrey Murfin

in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration

This chapter considers Stevenson’s acknowledged collaborations with his wife, Fanny, most substantially, their co-written work, The Dynamiter, also titled More New Arabian Nights (1885). Husband and ... More

This chapter considers Stevenson’s acknowledged collaborations with his wife, Fanny, most substantially, their co-written work, The Dynamiter, also titled More New Arabian Nights (1885). Husband and wife collaborations create subtle problems, largely because we expect a wife to assist her husband without credit. The Dynamiter structurally draws upon The Thousand and One Nights, which themselves concern issues of narrative and marriage. The Dynamiter, a novel about Irish terrorism, was well regarded in the nineteenth century, but not so in the twentieth or twenty-first, precisely because recent critics have resented Fanny’s involvement. The chapter additionally considers Fanny and Louis’ collaborative play “The Hanging Judge” and the controversy surrounding Fanny’s short story “The Nixie.”Less

Disjecta Membra: Collaboration and the Body of the Text in The Wrong Box and The Master of Ballantrae

Audrey Murfin

in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration

Stevenson’s most extensive and lengthy literary collaboration was with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne. Stevenson wrote the comic novel The Wrong Box with Osbourne in 1889. The Wrong Box is the only work ... More

Stevenson’s most extensive and lengthy literary collaboration was with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne. Stevenson wrote the comic novel The Wrong Box with Osbourne in 1889. The Wrong Box is the only work for which we have extensive manuscript material showing the creative process that the partners used. While Stevenson and Osbourne were at work together on the The Wrong Box, Stevenson was simultaneously working alone on the much better received The Master of Ballantrae (1889). Thematically similar to The Wrong Box but tonally opposite, The Master of Ballantrae revisits the questions of family and morality posed by The Wrong Box and demonstrates the extent to which Stevenson’s collaborations, and his thoughts about those collaborations, inform even work purportedly not collaborative.Less

Criminal Collaborators: Deacon Brodie and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Audrey Murfin

in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration

This chapter discusses Deacon Brodie (1880), one of three plays collaboratively composed with his friend W.E. Henley, along with Stevenson’s short story “The Body Snatcher” and his essay “A Chapter ... More

This chapter discusses Deacon Brodie (1880), one of three plays collaboratively composed with his friend W.E. Henley, along with Stevenson’s short story “The Body Snatcher” and his essay “A Chapter on Dreams.” Deacon Brodie is an early treatment of the themes more famously developed in the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Thus, Jekyll and Hyde, which owes its origins to the literal dual authorship, becomes a reflection on the fragmentation of the single author, as well as a reflection on the collaborative space of the theater.Less

‘A kind of partnership business’: The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide

Audrey Murfin

in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration

This chapter considers the last two, and best known, Stevenson-Osbourne literary collaborations. After The Wrong Box, the pair went on to write The Wrecker (1892) together, but privately Stevenson ... More

This chapter considers the last two, and best known, Stevenson-Osbourne literary collaborations. After The Wrong Box, the pair went on to write The Wrecker (1892) together, but privately Stevenson emphasized Lloyd Osbourne’s subordinate role and expressed his growing frustration with the creative process. Finally, they undertook The Ebb-Tide (1894), but by then the process had failed. Stevenson’s growing dissatisfaction with the collaboration forms the argument of both The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide. In particular, The Wrecker is a novel about partnerships and the compromises they require—of ethics, art, and self-interest, written at a moment when Stevenson himself was the most challenged by his own difficult partnership with Osbourne.Less

Collaboration in Theory and Practice

Audrey Murfin

in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration

This chapter considers Robert Louis Stevenson’s collaborations in the context of criticism on literary collaboration. In order to define collaboration, we must consider four essential questions: is ... More

This chapter considers Robert Louis Stevenson’s collaborations in the context of criticism on literary collaboration. In order to define collaboration, we must consider four essential questions: is it acknowledged? is it mutual? is it equal? and is it separable? All authors receive advice from others, making all creative practice in a sense collaborative, but this chapter proposes that texts in which the collaboration is mutually undertaken and overtly acknowledged differ fundamentally from traditionally authored texts. On the other hand, criticism of collaboration has been hampered by the assumption that true collaboration must be evenly divided (all of Stevenson’s collaborations were, in one way or another, unequal ones), and that the business of the critic is to solve the “problem” of who has written what, a project which shows an a priori scepticism about the possibility of collaboration at all.Less

Auto/biografiction: Counterfeit Lives: A Taxonomy of Displacements of Fiction towards Life‐Writing

Max Saunders

in Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature

This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety ... More

This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety of fake diaries, journals, biographies, and autobiographies. It takes a different approach to most of the other chapters, consisting of brief accounts of many works rather than sustained readings of a few. A taxonomy of modern engagements with life‐writing is proposed. The chapter moves on to discuss Galton's notion of ‘composite portraiture’ as a way of thinking about the surprisingly pervasive form of the portrait‐collection. The main examples are from Ford, Stefan Zweig, George Eliot, Hesketh Pearson, Gertrude Stein, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons; Isherwood and Joyce's Dubliners also figure. Where Chapters 3 and Chapter 4 focused on books with a single central subjectivity, this chapter looks at texts of multiple subjectivities. It concludes with a discussion of the argument that multiple works — an entire oeuvre — should be read as autobiography.Less

A Joy on the Precipice of Death: Muir and Stevenson in California

in The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept

This chapter examines the California travel narratives of Scottish free spirits Robert Louis Stevenson and John Muir, who set out to purge the Victorian cult of leisure, specifically, outdoorsy ... More

This chapter examines the California travel narratives of Scottish free spirits Robert Louis Stevenson and John Muir, who set out to purge the Victorian cult of leisure, specifically, outdoorsy sportiness, of its proprietary egoism. They reimagine the Golden State, their adopted home, as a sublime Romantic playground where the middle-class male ego disintegrates in the face of destructive nature, and where competitive men are reborn as little cosmic boys. Stevenson and Muir's literary efforts to rebrand California as a postapocalyptic, neo-Caledonian playground, as a land of death and play, helped shape the fledgling state's image of itself as an otherworldly and exceptional place. Modern California is a product, in part, of the Victorian world in play.Less

Counting

Maurice S. Lee

in Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution

This chapter talks about penetration of quantification into literary discourse. Lovers of literature could resist information and wax nostalgic for the deserted island reading of their youths, but ... More

This chapter talks about penetration of quantification into literary discourse. Lovers of literature could resist information and wax nostalgic for the deserted island reading of their youths, but adventure novels of the long nineteenth century show how “the accounting of literature” could also be aesthetically enchanting. British and American adventure novels from the period register a productive tension: guided by atavistic, preindustrial texts, characters flee from civilized realms marked by information overload only to impose informational modernity on the deserted islands and lost worlds they find. The chapter also explores the limits and wonders of quantification by using a sustained multiscalar approach—a close reading of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, a literary-historical argument that draws on a dozen transatlantic adventure fictions, and a distant reading project based on keyword frequencies in a corpus of 105 adventure novels. The chapter does not only explain how nineteenth-century literature accommodated the rise of information but also the prospect that the digital humanities might begin to tell a deeper history of itself.Less

Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James and the City of Encounters

Deaglán Ó Donghaile

in Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism

This chapter discusses the ‘dynamite novels’ of Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. It notes that these novels are both concerned with the relationship between political violence and late ... More

This chapter discusses the ‘dynamite novels’ of Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. It notes that these novels are both concerned with the relationship between political violence and late Victorian urban modernity, as well as the relationship between political violence and culture. These novels also explore the metropolitan conditions that produce and maintain terrorism. In some ways, they also address the cultural impact of terrorism upon the late Victorian imagination.Less

Collaborating with the Enemy: Treasure Island as Anti–Adventure Story

Marah Gubar

in Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature

The boys' adventure story is perhaps the genre that seems least likely to invite child readers to dodge rather than succumb to adult authority, since such stories often strive to brainwash boys into ... More

The boys' adventure story is perhaps the genre that seems least likely to invite child readers to dodge rather than succumb to adult authority, since such stories often strive to brainwash boys into committing themselves to the imperialist cause. Chapter 2 argues that Treasure Island, long accepted as an exemplary text in this regard, actually functions as an anti-adventure story, inciting child readers to see through the seductive propaganda of typical desert island romances. Like Ewing, Robert Louis Stevenson portrays the project of draining foreign lands of riches as traumatizing and morally problematic. At the same time, he exposes flattery as the key narrative technique adult storytellers employ to seduce children into embracing the project of empire-building. Thus, the duplicitous Long John Silver butters up Jim Hawkins using the very same techniques employed by writers like W. H. G. Kingston and R. M. Ballantyne: addressing the boy as an equal, promising to tell him the truth, and portraying him as an invaluable collaborator in the project of subduing foreign lands. Treasure Island warns children to beware of the treachery of such silver-tongued adult storytellers.Less

Anatolian Anthroponymy after Louis Robert … and Some Others1

Brixhe Claude

in Personal Names in Ancient Anatolia

Until the 1960s, two works of Johannes Sundwall were the unique repertories of the onomastics of Asia Minor. In 1963 appeared Noms indigènes de l’Asie Mineure gréco-romaine of Louis Robert, an ... More

Until the 1960s, two works of Johannes Sundwall were the unique repertories of the onomastics of Asia Minor. In 1963 appeared Noms indigènes de l’Asie Mineure gréco-romaine of Louis Robert, an indictment of the methods of Sundwall and invitation to rigorous philology, a turning point. For survivals from the second millennium, P.H.J. Houwink ten Cate, E. Laroche and L. Zgusta brought decisive complements. In the Roman period there occurs a ‘koinéfication’ of the name-stock of Asia Minor, with an overwhelming majority of Greek names and strong percentage of Latin. The only differences from region to region are the degree of resistance and the content of the indigenous element. Stress is laid on the need for a sociological and anthropological approach, which situates the name in society and so explains its origin and functioning: Hellenistic Pamphylia is taken as an example.Less

The Culmination of his Art: Tu rostro mañana

Gareth Wood

in Javier Marías's Debt to Translation: Sterne, Browne, Nabokov

This chapter is in two sections and offers a synthesis of the conclusions of the book and relates them to Marías's penultimate and longest novel, Tu rostro mañana. Hence, the first section of the ... More

This chapter is in two sections and offers a synthesis of the conclusions of the book and relates them to Marías's penultimate and longest novel, Tu rostro mañana. Hence, the first section of the chapter offers a close reading of the novel and suggests ways in which Marías develops and adds layers of complexity to what had been the preoccupations of the previous novels discussed in this study, preoccupations that include betrayal, the unknowability of others, the Spanish Civil War, intervention of the state in the life of the private individual. The first section traces the development of these preoccupations in both the novel and in Marías's journalism in the period of the novel's gestation. The chapter's second section shows how Marías has continued to use translation, intertextuality, and palimpsest as a means of developing the characterization in TRM. Close analysis is given of the quotations and paraphrasing of Shakespeare's King Henry V, W. G Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction, Milton's sonnets, Sefton Delmer's autobiography, and Robert Louis Stevenson's poetry.Less