Robert Louis Stevenson and the Great Affair

Movement, Memory and Modernity

Richard J. Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781472469359
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317062196
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations and table
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Robert Louis Stevenson and the great affair: Movement, memory and modernity
• 1 “A grand memory for forgetting”: Stevenson and survival
• 2 Stevenson’s metaphysics
• 3 The Wrecker: Unplacing space in the South Seas
• 4 Stratified time in “Pavilion on the Links”: A new master chronotope?
• 5 Temporality and text: Shapes of time in R.L. Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá” and “Markheim”
• 6 Twaddle and lies: Letters in Stevenson’s later fiction
• 7 “The possession of one’s mind by childish images”: Random memories: Rosa quo Locorum
• 8 “On the rack”: Shame and imperialism in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide
• 9 R.L. Stevenson and Covenanter Gothic
• 10 A Footnote to History: Stevenson, the past and the Samoan present
• 11 Monomaniacs, evolutionary science and the influence of Stevenson in Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau
• 12 Parallel prosecutions: Mormon polygamy and evidentiary doubt in The Dynamiter and A Study in Scarlet
• 13 “Tout à fait un grand écrivain”: Stevenson’s place in French literary history
• 14 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a literary and editorial phenomenon in Brazil
• 15 Hyde: Monsters, mashups and the Gothic body in the twenty-first century
• Bibliography
• List of contributors
• Index