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 ...
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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.
- 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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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.
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 ...
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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.
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 ...
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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.
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 ...
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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.
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 ...
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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.
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 ...
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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 ...
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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.
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 ...
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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.
- 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 ...
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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.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
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 ...
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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
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.
Linda Dryden
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748637744
- eISBN:
- 9780748652143
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637744.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter considers Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad as writers whose imperial fictions voiced attitudes towards adventure and encounters that are at odds with much of the literature of ...
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This chapter considers Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad as writers whose imperial fictions voiced attitudes towards adventure and encounters that are at odds with much of the literature of empire that went before and with the romance and adventure genre of the likes of Rider Haggard. It also argues that Stevenson should be regarded as an imperial sceptic whose fictions prepared the way for the bleak vision of empire that Conrad espoused. The Ebb-Tide is a tale of imperial misadventure in which three ne'er-do-wells stumble upon a self-aggrandising imperial despot on a remote Pacific island. Conrad's break with the imperial romance tradition finds clear expression in his earliest work, but with Heart of Darkness his modernist sensibilities become devastatingly apparent as they coincide with his critique of imperialism. Stevenson had commenced the task of unravelling the misconceptions about empire while Conrad was simultaneously working on the same project.Less
This chapter considers Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad as writers whose imperial fictions voiced attitudes towards adventure and encounters that are at odds with much of the literature of empire that went before and with the romance and adventure genre of the likes of Rider Haggard. It also argues that Stevenson should be regarded as an imperial sceptic whose fictions prepared the way for the bleak vision of empire that Conrad espoused. The Ebb-Tide is a tale of imperial misadventure in which three ne'er-do-wells stumble upon a self-aggrandising imperial despot on a remote Pacific island. Conrad's break with the imperial romance tradition finds clear expression in his earliest work, but with Heart of Darkness his modernist sensibilities become devastatingly apparent as they coincide with his critique of imperialism. Stevenson had commenced the task of unravelling the misconceptions about empire while Conrad was simultaneously working on the same project.
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853238492
- eISBN:
- 9781846315404
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846315404.004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novel, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, tackles the impact of a late nineteenth-century metropolis and its institutions upon identity. It echoes the elements ...
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Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novel, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, tackles the impact of a late nineteenth-century metropolis and its institutions upon identity. It echoes the elements of the barbarism found in early manifestations of the Gothic genre and relocates it in the modern city in the hyper-civilised and genteel world of fin de siècle England. Particularly in the context of British imperialism, the presence of Hyde represents a reversion to savagery in an apparently unlikely location. The novel also reflects the fragile discourse of degeneration theory and seems to speak more about the fears and the anxieties of the fin de siècle bourgeoisie than monstrosity in general. Stevenson's Gothic vision is rendered distinctive by the consistent intrusion of the elements and symptoms of nineteenth-century modernity, which also highlights the symbolic resonance of the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde.Less
Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novel, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, tackles the impact of a late nineteenth-century metropolis and its institutions upon identity. It echoes the elements of the barbarism found in early manifestations of the Gothic genre and relocates it in the modern city in the hyper-civilised and genteel world of fin de siècle England. Particularly in the context of British imperialism, the presence of Hyde represents a reversion to savagery in an apparently unlikely location. The novel also reflects the fragile discourse of degeneration theory and seems to speak more about the fears and the anxieties of the fin de siècle bourgeoisie than monstrosity in general. Stevenson's Gothic vision is rendered distinctive by the consistent intrusion of the elements and symptoms of nineteenth-century modernity, which also highlights the symbolic resonance of the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde.
David Sergeant
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199684588
- eISBN:
- 9780191765889
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199684588.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This book re-establishes Kipling as a major artist. Through extended close readings of individual works, and unprecedentedly detailed attention to changes in location and readership, it distinguishes ...
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This book re-establishes Kipling as a major artist. Through extended close readings of individual works, and unprecedentedly detailed attention to changes in location and readership, it distinguishes between two kinds of Kipling fiction. The first is coercive and concerned with the authoritarian control of meaning; the second relates less directly to its immediate historical surroundings and is more aesthetically complex. Misunderstandings have often resulted from confusing the two kinds of work. Distinguishing between them allows for a newly coherent account of Kipling's career, both explaining his artistic achievement and making clearer his identity as a political writer. Changes in Kipling's narrative practice are tracked as he moves from India to Britain and the US, and engages with a succession of new audiences and political contexts; detailed readings are provided of such key texts as Plain Tales from the Hills, The Jungle Books, and Kim. As well as revealing the precise nature of Kipling's artistry, this book shows how properties of narrative which have been generally underrated — such as embodiment and externality — can be used to make sophisticated fictions, and by linking these to Robert Louis Stevenson's discussion of the romance, suggests new ways in which such work might be approached.Less
This book re-establishes Kipling as a major artist. Through extended close readings of individual works, and unprecedentedly detailed attention to changes in location and readership, it distinguishes between two kinds of Kipling fiction. The first is coercive and concerned with the authoritarian control of meaning; the second relates less directly to its immediate historical surroundings and is more aesthetically complex. Misunderstandings have often resulted from confusing the two kinds of work. Distinguishing between them allows for a newly coherent account of Kipling's career, both explaining his artistic achievement and making clearer his identity as a political writer. Changes in Kipling's narrative practice are tracked as he moves from India to Britain and the US, and engages with a succession of new audiences and political contexts; detailed readings are provided of such key texts as Plain Tales from the Hills, The Jungle Books, and Kim. As well as revealing the precise nature of Kipling's artistry, this book shows how properties of narrative which have been generally underrated — such as embodiment and externality — can be used to make sophisticated fictions, and by linking these to Robert Louis Stevenson's discussion of the romance, suggests new ways in which such work might be approached.
Laura Helen Marks
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252042140
- eISBN:
- 9780252050886
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042140.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter discusses transformation and duality in pornographic adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Hardcore adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde utilize the concept ...
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This chapter discusses transformation and duality in pornographic adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Hardcore adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde utilize the concept of dual selves to explore crises in queer sexual subjectivity and female sexual desire. Through an analysis of the gay comedies Heavy Equipment (1977) and Dr. Jerkoff and Mr. Hard (1997), and the Vivid Video hetero drama Jekyll and Hyde (1999), this chapter demonstrates the different ways gay and straight pornographers draw on the erotic pleasures of transformation as a way of exploring sexual crisis and a desire to break free from rigid and illusory formulations of identity and desire.Less
This chapter discusses transformation and duality in pornographic adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Hardcore adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde utilize the concept of dual selves to explore crises in queer sexual subjectivity and female sexual desire. Through an analysis of the gay comedies Heavy Equipment (1977) and Dr. Jerkoff and Mr. Hard (1997), and the Vivid Video hetero drama Jekyll and Hyde (1999), this chapter demonstrates the different ways gay and straight pornographers draw on the erotic pleasures of transformation as a way of exploring sexual crisis and a desire to break free from rigid and illusory formulations of identity and desire.
Louisa Gairn
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748633111
- eISBN:
- 9780748653447
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748633111.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Scottish Studies
This book presents a provocative and timely reconsideration of modern Scottish literature in the light of ecological thought. The book demonstrates how successive generations of Scottish writers have ...
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This book presents a provocative and timely reconsideration of modern Scottish literature in the light of ecological thought. The book demonstrates how successive generations of Scottish writers have both reflected on and contributed to the development of international ecological theory and philosophy. Provocative re-readings of works by authors including Robert Louis Stevenson, John Muir, Nan Shepherd, John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, and George Mackay Brown demonstrate the significance of ecological thought across the spectrum of Scottish literary culture. This book traces the influence of ecology as a scientific, philosophical, and political concept in the work of these and other writers and in doing so presents an original outlook on Scottish literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In this age of environmental crisis, the book reveals a heritage of ecological thought which should be recognised as of vital relevance both to Scottish literary culture and to the wider field of green studies.Less
This book presents a provocative and timely reconsideration of modern Scottish literature in the light of ecological thought. The book demonstrates how successive generations of Scottish writers have both reflected on and contributed to the development of international ecological theory and philosophy. Provocative re-readings of works by authors including Robert Louis Stevenson, John Muir, Nan Shepherd, John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, and George Mackay Brown demonstrate the significance of ecological thought across the spectrum of Scottish literary culture. This book traces the influence of ecology as a scientific, philosophical, and political concept in the work of these and other writers and in doing so presents an original outlook on Scottish literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In this age of environmental crisis, the book reveals a heritage of ecological thought which should be recognised as of vital relevance both to Scottish literary culture and to the wider field of green studies.
Jefferson A. Singer
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199328543
- eISBN:
- 9780190637972
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199328543.001.0001
- Subject:
- Psychology, Social Psychology
The Proper Pirate: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Quest for Identity explores the nineteenth-century author Robert Louis Stevenson’s psychological journey from a constricted and religious family of ...
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The Proper Pirate: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Quest for Identity explores the nineteenth-century author Robert Louis Stevenson’s psychological journey from a constricted and religious family of Scottish engineers to a life of imagination and adventure that culminated in the South Seas island of Samoa. Drawing on contemporary theories of identity development, the author traces how Stevenson overcame Victorian dualities of piety versus passion in his personal life and artistic works, gradually edging toward a more modernist and complicated moral vision. This first full-length psychobiographical analysis of Stevenson follows the trajectory of his life, while highlighting how key memories and conflicts within his personality shaped the narrative structure and themes of his most celebrated works, Treasure Island, A Child’s Garden of Verses, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped. Stevenson’s relationships to his parents, wife, Fanny, and circle of intimate friends also play a prominent role in this investigation of his emerging identity and artistic work. Drawing on Stevenson’s extensive volumes of correspondence, personal memoirs, essays, novels, stories, and poems, as well as historical documents, multiple biographies, and critical studies, the author uses his background as a clinical psychologist and researcher in personality science to provide new insights into Stevenson’s psychological development. In doing so, he helps to unlock the mystery of how a sickly youth confined to the “land of the counterpane” grew up to become the author of some of the world’s most beloved and enduring works of adventure and fantasy.Less
The Proper Pirate: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Quest for Identity explores the nineteenth-century author Robert Louis Stevenson’s psychological journey from a constricted and religious family of Scottish engineers to a life of imagination and adventure that culminated in the South Seas island of Samoa. Drawing on contemporary theories of identity development, the author traces how Stevenson overcame Victorian dualities of piety versus passion in his personal life and artistic works, gradually edging toward a more modernist and complicated moral vision. This first full-length psychobiographical analysis of Stevenson follows the trajectory of his life, while highlighting how key memories and conflicts within his personality shaped the narrative structure and themes of his most celebrated works, Treasure Island, A Child’s Garden of Verses, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped. Stevenson’s relationships to his parents, wife, Fanny, and circle of intimate friends also play a prominent role in this investigation of his emerging identity and artistic work. Drawing on Stevenson’s extensive volumes of correspondence, personal memoirs, essays, novels, stories, and poems, as well as historical documents, multiple biographies, and critical studies, the author uses his background as a clinical psychologist and researcher in personality science to provide new insights into Stevenson’s psychological development. In doing so, he helps to unlock the mystery of how a sickly youth confined to the “land of the counterpane” grew up to become the author of some of the world’s most beloved and enduring works of adventure and fantasy.
Gareth Wood
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199651337
- eISBN:
- 9780191741180
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199651337.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
