Audrey Murfin
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474451987
- eISBN:
- 9781474477109
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474451987.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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
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.
Audrey Murfin
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474451987
- eISBN:
- 9781474477109
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474451987.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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
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.”
Audrey Murfin
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474451987
- eISBN:
- 9781474477109
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474451987.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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
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.
Audrey Murfin
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474451987
- eISBN:
- 9781474477109
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474451987.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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
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.
Audrey Murfin
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474451987
- eISBN:
- 9781474477109
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474451987.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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
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.
Julia Sun-Joo Lee
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390322
- eISBN:
- 9780199776207
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390322.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
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
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.
Audrey Murfin
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474451987
- eISBN:
- 9781474477109
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474451987.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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
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.
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804776080
- eISBN:
- 9780804778947
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804776080.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
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
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.
Jennifer Fuller
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474413848
- eISBN:
- 9781474422093
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474413848.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The fourth chapter turns to British settlers in the Pacific whose attempts to create ideal colonies reveal the weaknesses inherent in the British concept of themselves as a “superior” civilizing ...
More
The fourth chapter turns to British settlers in the Pacific whose attempts to create ideal colonies reveal the weaknesses inherent in the British concept of themselves as a “superior” civilizing force. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Vailima Letters and The Beach of Falesá, he questions the right of the British to colonize or settle in the South Seas as part of a “civilizing mission.” By examining the effects of the invasive settler, explorer, and trader on the island landscape, Stevenson linked the health of the islanders and the state of the islands, presenting European invasion as a violent and potentially dangerous “disease.”
While Stevenson focused primarily on the interactions between British and Pacific islanders, Joseph Conrad instead focused on the ways in which life in the Pacific impacted British individuals in his later and largely overlooked Pacific works, Freya of the Seven Isles and “Because of the Dollars. Conrad’s work reflects an increasingly dark vision of British settlement in the Pacific, one that depicts British men and women as weak and degenerate.Less
The fourth chapter turns to British settlers in the Pacific whose attempts to create ideal colonies reveal the weaknesses inherent in the British concept of themselves as a “superior” civilizing force. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Vailima Letters and The Beach of Falesá, he questions the right of the British to colonize or settle in the South Seas as part of a “civilizing mission.” By examining the effects of the invasive settler, explorer, and trader on the island landscape, Stevenson linked the health of the islanders and the state of the islands, presenting European invasion as a violent and potentially dangerous “disease.”
While Stevenson focused primarily on the interactions between British and Pacific islanders, Joseph Conrad instead focused on the ways in which life in the Pacific impacted British individuals in his later and largely overlooked Pacific works, Freya of the Seven Isles and “Because of the Dollars. Conrad’s work reflects an increasingly dark vision of British settlement in the Pacific, one that depicts British men and women as weak and degenerate.
Deaglán Ó Donghaile
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748640676
- eISBN:
- 9780748651689
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748640676.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
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
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.
Matthew Kaiser
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804776080
- eISBN:
- 9780804778947
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804776080.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Nineteenth-century Britain was a world in play. The Victorians invented the weekend and built hundreds of parks and playgrounds. In the wake of Darwin, they re-imagined nature as a contest for ...
More
Nineteenth-century Britain was a world in play. The Victorians invented the weekend and built hundreds of parks and playgrounds. In the wake of Darwin, they re-imagined nature as a contest for survival. The playful child became a symbol of the future. A world in play means two things: a world in flux and a world trapped, like Alice in Wonderland, in a ludic microcosm of itself. This book explores the extent to which play (competition, leisure, mischief, luck, festivity, imagination) pervades nineteenth-century literature and culture and forms the foundations of the modern self. Play made the Victorian world cohere and betrayed the illusoriness of that coherence. This is the paradox of modernity. The author gives an account of how certain Victorian misfits—working-class melodramatists of the 1830s, the reclusive Emily Brontë, free spirits Robert Louis Stevenson and John Muir, mischievous Oscar Wilde—struggled to make sense of this new world. In so doing, they discovered the art of modern life.Less
Nineteenth-century Britain was a world in play. The Victorians invented the weekend and built hundreds of parks and playgrounds. In the wake of Darwin, they re-imagined nature as a contest for survival. The playful child became a symbol of the future. A world in play means two things: a world in flux and a world trapped, like Alice in Wonderland, in a ludic microcosm of itself. This book explores the extent to which play (competition, leisure, mischief, luck, festivity, imagination) pervades nineteenth-century literature and culture and forms the foundations of the modern self. Play made the Victorian world cohere and betrayed the illusoriness of that coherence. This is the paradox of modernity. The author gives an account of how certain Victorian misfits—working-class melodramatists of the 1830s, the reclusive Emily Brontë, free spirits Robert Louis Stevenson and John Muir, mischievous Oscar Wilde—struggled to make sense of this new world. In so doing, they discovered the art of modern life.
Marah Gubar
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195336252
- eISBN:
- 9780199868490
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195336252.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian 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
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.
Audrey Murfin
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474451987
- eISBN:
- 9781474477109
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474451987.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Robert Louis Stevenson, Collaboration, and the Construction of the Late-Victorian Author argues that understanding literary collaboration is essential to understanding Stevenson’s writings. Stevenson ...
More
Robert Louis Stevenson, Collaboration, and the Construction of the Late-Victorian Author argues that understanding literary collaboration is essential to understanding Stevenson’s writings. Stevenson often collaborated with family and friends, sometimes acknowledged, and sometimes not. Early collaborations include three plays with his friend W. E. Henley. Later, he and his wife Fanny co-authored a volume of linked stories, More New Arabian Nights, also titled The Dynamiter (1885). Fanny also contributed to other work that did not bear her name, significantly the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and he drew on her diaries for his Pacific writings. He collaborated most extensively with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, with whom he wrote three novels: The Wrong Box (1889), The Wrecker (1892), and The Ebb-Tide (1894). Stevenson’s collaborations with Osbourne typify the critical problem my project addresses. Like Fanny Stevenson’s, Osbourne’s literary reputation has not been notable. Furthermore, there is evidence that Stevenson’s collaborations with Osbourne became frustrating. The core question this book addresses is this: why would this famous and successful author of Scottish literature practice a creative process that burdened him with inexpert collaborators? The answer to this question can be found in Stevenson’s novels, essays and plays, which dramatize the process of collaboration. Stevenson creates an alternate narrative of what it means to write—one that challenges commonly held assumptions about the celebrity cult of the author in Victorian literature, and notions of authorship more generally.Less
Robert Louis Stevenson, Collaboration, and the Construction of the Late-Victorian Author argues that understanding literary collaboration is essential to understanding Stevenson’s writings. Stevenson often collaborated with family and friends, sometimes acknowledged, and sometimes not. Early collaborations include three plays with his friend W. E. Henley. Later, he and his wife Fanny co-authored a volume of linked stories, More New Arabian Nights, also titled The Dynamiter (1885). Fanny also contributed to other work that did not bear her name, significantly the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and he drew on her diaries for his Pacific writings. He collaborated most extensively with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, with whom he wrote three novels: The Wrong Box (1889), The Wrecker (1892), and The Ebb-Tide (1894). Stevenson’s collaborations with Osbourne typify the critical problem my project addresses. Like Fanny Stevenson’s, Osbourne’s literary reputation has not been notable. Furthermore, there is evidence that Stevenson’s collaborations with Osbourne became frustrating. The core question this book addresses is this: why would this famous and successful author of Scottish literature practice a creative process that burdened him with inexpert collaborators? The answer to this question can be found in Stevenson’s novels, essays and plays, which dramatize the process of collaboration. Stevenson creates an alternate narrative of what it means to write—one that challenges commonly held assumptions about the celebrity cult of the author in Victorian literature, and notions of authorship more generally.
Penny Fielding
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198121800
- eISBN:
- 9780191671319
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198121800.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Some of the most important recent work on Scottish writing has been on the development of the romance in the first half of the late 19th century. By the end of the 19th century, an increasingly ...
More
Some of the most important recent work on Scottish writing has been on the development of the romance in the first half of the late 19th century. By the end of the 19th century, an increasingly emphatic masculinization of the romance and its laying claim to an imaginative authenticity came under stresses and strains which its adherents could not withstand. Nevertheless, the particular problems of later 19th-century oral did not hinder its enthusiastic adoption by participants in two important debates at this point: one about popular literature and the other about realism in fiction. This chapter shows that for Andrew Lang and Robert Louis Stevenson, the romance became a way of negotiating a place in these debates, and they continued to organize their arguments along the lines of speech and writing.Less
Some of the most important recent work on Scottish writing has been on the development of the romance in the first half of the late 19th century. By the end of the 19th century, an increasingly emphatic masculinization of the romance and its laying claim to an imaginative authenticity came under stresses and strains which its adherents could not withstand. Nevertheless, the particular problems of later 19th-century oral did not hinder its enthusiastic adoption by participants in two important debates at this point: one about popular literature and the other about realism in fiction. This chapter shows that for Andrew Lang and Robert Louis Stevenson, the romance became a way of negotiating a place in these debates, and they continued to organize their arguments along the lines of speech and writing.
Maurice S. Lee
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691192925
- eISBN:
- 9780691194219
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691192925.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
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
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.
Stefanie Rudig
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748669097
- eISBN:
- 9780748695140
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748669097.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
This essay focuses on the parallels between two (proto-)modernist stories: ‘The Beach of Falesá’ by Robert Louis Stevenson and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’. Even though the authors’ movements ...
More
This essay focuses on the parallels between two (proto-)modernist stories: ‘The Beach of Falesá’ by Robert Louis Stevenson and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’. Even though the authors’ movements across the Pacific were diametrically opposed, their novella-length stories lend themselves to a comparison; both writers explore notions of home and of simultaneous belonging and alienation. Stevenson, whose fame relies largely on his adventure stories, writes against a Eurocentric textualisation of the South Pacific in his realist rendering of a cross-cultural romance, thus challenging the traditional dichotomy between ‘them’ and ‘us’. By contrast, Mansfield writes back to her homeland, placing the Burnell/Fairfield family in the New Zealand setting to investigate questions of identity and home as fluid and dynamic concepts. As both authors re-evaluate the relationship between self and other, between the strange and the familiar, they show that the difference between traversed and transgressive space is a thin line.Less
This essay focuses on the parallels between two (proto-)modernist stories: ‘The Beach of Falesá’ by Robert Louis Stevenson and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’. Even though the authors’ movements across the Pacific were diametrically opposed, their novella-length stories lend themselves to a comparison; both writers explore notions of home and of simultaneous belonging and alienation. Stevenson, whose fame relies largely on his adventure stories, writes against a Eurocentric textualisation of the South Pacific in his realist rendering of a cross-cultural romance, thus challenging the traditional dichotomy between ‘them’ and ‘us’. By contrast, Mansfield writes back to her homeland, placing the Burnell/Fairfield family in the New Zealand setting to investigate questions of identity and home as fluid and dynamic concepts. As both authors re-evaluate the relationship between self and other, between the strange and the familiar, they show that the difference between traversed and transgressive space is a thin line.
Caroline McCracken-Flesher
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199766826
- eISBN:
- 9780190252854
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199766826.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter looks at Robert Louis Stevenson's “The Body Snatcher.” Thoroughly subjected by Scotland and by period medicine, Stevenson writes here as if he has at last escaped the clutch of both, and ...
More
This chapter looks at Robert Louis Stevenson's “The Body Snatcher.” Thoroughly subjected by Scotland and by period medicine, Stevenson writes here as if he has at last escaped the clutch of both, and thus the traumatizing reach of Doctor Knox. In the Christmas Extra for the Pall Mall Gazette of 1884, he purveys this Scottish horror for the British market. England celebrated his winter's tale in screaming advertisements, and gobbled it up through numerous reprintings. But “The Body Snatcher” is only Stevenson's first visit to the doctor. Trauma demands repetition, and in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Stevenson translates the anxieties of 1828 into the era of chemical medicine—and exports them to London. In The Wrong Box (1889) he displaces them into yet another genre: comedy is the symptom of a broader critique.Less
This chapter looks at Robert Louis Stevenson's “The Body Snatcher.” Thoroughly subjected by Scotland and by period medicine, Stevenson writes here as if he has at last escaped the clutch of both, and thus the traumatizing reach of Doctor Knox. In the Christmas Extra for the Pall Mall Gazette of 1884, he purveys this Scottish horror for the British market. England celebrated his winter's tale in screaming advertisements, and gobbled it up through numerous reprintings. But “The Body Snatcher” is only Stevenson's first visit to the doctor. Trauma demands repetition, and in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Stevenson translates the anxieties of 1828 into the era of chemical medicine—and exports them to London. In The Wrong Box (1889) he displaces them into yet another genre: comedy is the symptom of a broader critique.
Louisa Gairn
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748633111
- eISBN:
- 9780748653447
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748633111.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Scottish Studies
This chapter considers the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson alongside those of nineteenth-century mountaineering intellectuals John Veitch and John Stuart Blackie, land rights campaigners, and the ...
More
This chapter considers the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson alongside those of nineteenth-century mountaineering intellectuals John Veitch and John Stuart Blackie, land rights campaigners, and the poetry of Gaelic crofters, which, taken together, demonstrate a crucial shift towards a more bodily experience of the natural world, a new ‘feeling for nature’ spurred by developments in biological science which offered fresh perspectives on the relationship between self and world. It reports that the period from the 1850s until the end of the century saw the activity of mountaineering become increasingly popular in the British Isles, and become not only a sport but a ‘science of a highly complex character, cultivated by trained experts, with a vocabulary, an artillery, and rigorous methods of its own’.Less
This chapter considers the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson alongside those of nineteenth-century mountaineering intellectuals John Veitch and John Stuart Blackie, land rights campaigners, and the poetry of Gaelic crofters, which, taken together, demonstrate a crucial shift towards a more bodily experience of the natural world, a new ‘feeling for nature’ spurred by developments in biological science which offered fresh perspectives on the relationship between self and world. It reports that the period from the 1850s until the end of the century saw the activity of mountaineering become increasingly popular in the British Isles, and become not only a sport but a ‘science of a highly complex character, cultivated by trained experts, with a vocabulary, an artillery, and rigorous methods of its own’.
Patrick Collier
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474413473
- eISBN:
- 9781474426824
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474413473.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter argues that the Illustrated London News and its imitators in the 1890s evolved a new and particularly apt system for representing the empire, the city of London, and the literary ...
More
This chapter argues that the Illustrated London News and its imitators in the 1890s evolved a new and particularly apt system for representing the empire, the city of London, and the literary marketplace—all arenas that were expanding in rapid and disorienting fashion. By manipulating a nexus of space and value—indeed, by valuing its own page space according to an imperial spatial logic—the Illustrated London News traded on the comforting fiction that a vast and changing world could be ordered and comprehended on a weekly basis. The chapter traces these dynamics in text-and-image packages surrounding news from the empire, advertisements, and fiction by Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson.Less
This chapter argues that the Illustrated London News and its imitators in the 1890s evolved a new and particularly apt system for representing the empire, the city of London, and the literary marketplace—all arenas that were expanding in rapid and disorienting fashion. By manipulating a nexus of space and value—indeed, by valuing its own page space according to an imperial spatial logic—the Illustrated London News traded on the comforting fiction that a vast and changing world could be ordered and comprehended on a weekly basis. The chapter traces these dynamics in text-and-image packages surrounding news from the empire, advertisements, and fiction by Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson.
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846312373
- eISBN:
- 9781846316173
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846316173.004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Social Groups
This chapter discusses the borderlands of epilepsy. It reviews the monks, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the untimely death of Arthur Thomas Myers. These ideas and ...
More
This chapter discusses the borderlands of epilepsy. It reviews the monks, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the untimely death of Arthur Thomas Myers. These ideas and disparate events are all part of the circuit of culture that shapes epilepsy narratives well into the twentieth century. This chapter shows the success of Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoevsky in negotiating from the borderlands an enunciative position that compelled medical engagement and dialogue that goes some way in addressing the unliveable oppositions confronting Myers. It also suggests the conflict faced by Myers as a physician and an epileptic at the end of the nineteenth century.Less
This chapter discusses the borderlands of epilepsy. It reviews the monks, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the untimely death of Arthur Thomas Myers. These ideas and disparate events are all part of the circuit of culture that shapes epilepsy narratives well into the twentieth century. This chapter shows the success of Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoevsky in negotiating from the borderlands an enunciative position that compelled medical engagement and dialogue that goes some way in addressing the unliveable oppositions confronting Myers. It also suggests the conflict faced by Myers as a physician and an epileptic at the end of the nineteenth century.