Search Results

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.

This chapter tracks Robert Louis Stevenson’s collaboration with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. This partnership reveals both Stevenson’s complex understanding of authorship and how technologies and genres designed to enforce adult authority over children—the toy press and adventure fiction—can instead encourage intergenerational collaboration. Through privately printed and publicly circulated texts, Stevenson and Osbourne explored the relationships that surround and indeed comprise the figure of the writer: between adult and child, between author and businessman, and among multiple contributors to a text. Authorship emerges as a social act among multiple generations and personae. Tracing this collaboration from Osbourne’s childhood ventures with his stepfather, including the composition of Treasure Island, through the pair’s coauthorship as adults and into Osbourne’s maturity, this chapter illuminates how the child’s growth and entrance into adulthood transforms the practice of multiple authorship and provides authors the opportunity to explore the possibilities of child agency.

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.

The 1946 comic strip, Mā-chan no nikkichō (The Diary of Mā-chan), marked Osamu Tezuka’s professional career as a cartoonist. Serialized in the newspaper Mainichi Shōgakusei Shinbun, The Diary of Mā-chan enjoyed a warm reception among Japanese children after a long absence of newspaper cartoons in Japan. Prior to The Diary of Mā-chan, Tezuka had already completed a number of long, book-length comics. But it was Shin takarajima (New Treasure Island), a 200-page adventure comic book based on a script by Sakai Shichima, that earned Tezuka his popularity and fame. Published in January 1947 in a format called akahon, New Treasure Island was highly successful, selling more than 400,000 copies. Tezuka began to consciously promote a new kind of comics through this work by heavily referencing film. He diverged into genres that corresponded to popular film genres, quoting images from popular films, and borrowing titles. Tezuka started incorporating a more solid vocabulary of “cinematic techniques,” which later became his trademark, in Metropolis (1948). Another challenge for Tezuka was the transition from akahon to magazine serials.

Fleming desperately wanted to remake Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale Treasure Island, and when he did, he made sure MGM gave him the resources he needed. This chapter recounts the mechanics of preparing for and shooting the epic and elemental melodrama. Sragow summarizes both the original story and the changes Mahin and Fleming made to it in order to increase the film’s intensity. It starred Jackie Cooper as Jim Hawkins and Wallace Beery as Long John Silver. The film was a huge commercial and critical success and is still billed as one of the best versions of Stevenson’s tale.

This chapter chronicles Charles Darwin's swashbuckling adventures aboard the Beagle in search of nature's secrets, riding in the company of gauchos, the pirates of the pampas. It compares Darwin to Jim Hawkins, the central character in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island. There's quite a bit of Jim Hawkins in Darwin's youthful persona, and perhaps a bit of romantic admiration for the piratical characters of the world. When imagining Darwin, instead of a Victorian gentleman, think young Jim Hawkins. Imagine Darwin being on the deck of the Beagle amidst a stormy sea. This chapter recounts Darwin's voyage aboard the Beagle, which first sailed on May 22, 1826, and again on December 27, 1831. It describes an act of piracy committed by the ship's captain Robert FitzRoy, who took several Fuegians hostage; the struggle between the military government of the Blancos and the elected government of Uruguay; and Darwin's encounter with young gauchos.

Chapter 4 picks up Stevenson’s story with a return to Scotland with his new family in tow and reconciliation with his parents. His health still suffering, Fanny and he spend a year in the health resort of Davos and his productivity suffers. Returning for the summer to Scotland, he embraces his native land and writes some of his best short stories, followed by Treasure Island. The chapter reviews the origins of this classic work and illustrates how the relationship between Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver perfectly encapsulates the psychological tension around the energy associated with amoral action that Stevenson often found seductive. It goes on to illustrate how Jim’s journey from boyhood to maturity is a vivid allegory for Stevenson’s own identity development and insights into moral ambiguity.

The second part of this book focuses on To Have and Have Not. The perceived flaws of Hemingway's third novel have been so elaborated upon that the elements that truly make it interesting, especially its historical and literary background, have garnered little if any attention. Noting that Sir Henry Morgan was a famous seventeenth-century pirate, this chapter explores the rich tradition of maritime piracy the novel intertextually engages, including Treasure Island, Peter Pan, The Pirates of Penzance, and many others.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, there were scant traces of the northeast’s former Native power. Wabanaki themselves struggled to hold on to their maritime past as Euro-American powers confined them to small reserves on land and then worked to forget their history of conflict, dependency, and defeat at the hands of a powerful Indian confederacy. Romantic notions of the “vanishing Indian” became commonplace in nineteenth century New England society, and coupled with a similar romanticization of pirates, Anglo- Americans increasingly lost sight of this dark chapter of their past.