Robert Louis Stevenson and the Great Affair
Movement, Memory and Modernity
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Book Description
In his travel narrative Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), Robert Louis Stevenson declares, "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Taking up the concepts of time, place, and memory, the contributors to this collection explore in what ways the dynamic view of life suggested by this quotation permeates Stevenson's work. The essays adopt a wide variety of critical approaches, including post-colonial theory, post-structuralism, new historicism, art history, and philosophy, making use of the vast array of literary materials that Stevenson left across a global journey that began in Scotland in 1850 and ended in Samoa in 1894. These range from travel journals, letters, and classic literary staples such as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to rarely read masterpieces such as The Master of Ballantrae or The Ebb-Tide. While much recent scholarship on Stevenson foregrounds geography, the present volume also examines the theme of movement across memory, time, and generic boundaries. Taken together, the essays offer a view of Stevenson that demonstrates how the protean nature of his literary output reflects the radical developments in science, technology, and culture that characterized the age in which he lived.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Adrian Poole "‘A grand memory for forgetting’: Stevenson and survival"
2. Peter Holbrook "Stevenson’s Metaphysics"
3. Caroline McCracken-Flesher "The Wrecker: Unplacing Space in the South Seas"
4. Naomi Carle "Stratified Time in ‘Pavilion on the Links’: A New Master Chronotope?"
5. Bridget Mellifont "Temporality and Text: Shapes of Time in R.L Stevenson's 'The Beach of Falesá' and 'Markheim'"
6. Ann Colley "Twaddle and Lies: Letters in Stevenson’s Later Fiction"
7. Robert-Louis Abrahamson "The possession of one’s mind by childish images": Random Memories
8. Roland Alexander "‘On the rack’: shame and imperialism in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide"
9. Ken Gelder "R. L. Stevenson and Covenanter Gothic"
10. Graham Tulloch "A Footnote to History: Stevenson, the Past and the Samoan Present"
11. Linda Dryden "Monomaniacs, Evolutionary Science and the Influence of Stevenson in Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau"
12. Brian Wall and Sarah Ames "Parallel Prosecutions: Mormon Polygamy and Evidentiary Doubt in The Dynamiter and A Study in Scarlet"
13. Mark Fitzpatrick "‘Tout a Fait un Grand Ecrivain’: Stevenson’s Place in French Literary History"
14. AnaJulia Perrotti-Garcia "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a literary and editorial phenomenon in Brazil"
15. Anthony Mandal "Hyde: Monsters, Mashups and the Gothic Body in the Twenty-First Century"
Author bios
Select Bibliography
Index
Editor(s)
Biography
Richard J. Hill is Assistant Professor of English at Chaminade University of Honolulu, USA.