Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific
Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific

Author: Roslyn Jolly

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1351902741

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Robert Louis Stevenson's departure from Europe in 1887 coincided with a vocational crisis prompted by his father's death. Impatient with his established identity as a writer, Stevenson was eager to explore different ways of writing, at the same time that living in the Pacific stimulated a range of latent intellectual and political interests. Roslyn Jolly examines the crucial period from 1887 to 1894, focusing on the self-transformation wrought in Stevenson's Pacific travel-writing and political texts. Jolly shows how Stevenson's desire to understand unfamiliar Polynesian and Micronesian cultures, and to record and intervene in the politics of Samoa, gave him opportunities to use his legal education, pursue his interest in historiography, and experiment with anthropology and journalism. Thus as his geographical and cultural horizons expanded, Stevenson's professional sphere enlarged as well, stretching the category of authorship in which his successes as a novelist had placed him. Rather than enhancing his stature as a popular writer, however, Stevenson's experiments with new styles and genres, and the Pacific subject matter of his later works, were resisted by his readers. Jolly's analysis of contemporary responses to Stevenson's writing, gleaned from an extensive collection of reviews, many of which are not readily available, provides fascinating insights into the interests, obsessions, and resistances of Victorian readers. As Stevenson sought to escape the vocational straightjacket that confined him, his readers just as strenuously expressed their loyalty to outmoded images of Stevenson the author, and their distrust of the new guises in which he presented himself.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Impressions
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Impressions

Author: Carla Manfredi

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-11-11

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 331998313X

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This book tackles photography’s role during Robert Louis Stevenson’s travels throughout the Pacific Island region and is the first study of his family’s previously unpublished photographs. Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, the book integrates photographs with letters, non-fiction, and poetry, and includes much unpublished material. The original readings of photographs and non-fiction highlight Stevenson’s engagement with colonial ideology and reality and advance new arguments about Victorian travel, settlement, and colonialisms in the Pacific. Like the Stevensons, the book moves from the Marquesas to the atolls of the Gilbert Islands in Micronesia; from the Kingdom of Hawai‘i’s political ambitions to Samoan plantations and the Stevensons’ settlement at Vailima. Central to this study is the notion that Pacific history and Pacific Island cultures matter to the interpretation of Stevenson's work, and a rigorous historical and cultural contextualization ensures that local details structure literary and photographic interpretation. The book’s historical grounding is key to its insightful conclusions regarding travel, settlement, photography, and colonialism.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson

Author: Harold Bloom

Publisher: Infobase Publishing

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1438113455

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Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Collected Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson
Collected Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson

Author: Stevenson R. L. Stevenson

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2019-08-07

Total Pages: 672

ISBN-13: 1474472877

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At last - a complete new edition of the poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson.During his lifetime Stevenson published A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), Penny Whistles, Underwoods (1887) and Ballads (1890). There were also various private press adventures in poetry with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, and the posthumous Songs of Travel (1895), and New Poems (1918). This new edition contains these collections and also some of Stevenson's printed and manuscript poems that have never been published in any collection. The edition also identifies and restores various poems assembled by Stevenson in his Notebooks, many of which were mutilated by members of The Boston Bibliophile Society.The editor, Roger Lewis, has carefully studied Stevenson's manuscripts and letters, identifying many variants in individual poems and in orders of his collections, as well as in the editorial procedures of a succession of RLS's literary associates who claimed to be fulfilling his intentions or acting on his authority.The ordering of this edition will follow Stevenson's own final arrangement over unauthorised editorial rearrangments or strict considerations of chronology. Complete and accurate dates of composition and publication of individual poems and of collections are given wherever possible.Appendices include bibliographical description and location for manuscript and printed sources of all poems in the edition; 'poems in process' - how Stevenson sketched and revised during composition; notebooks - bibliographical history and significance; chronology and ordonnance of poetic units. There are also explanatory and textual notes. Scots poems are glossed and annotated using The Concise Scots Dictionary and web resources of the SNDA.A substantial introduction covers the publishing histories of individual volumes and literary influences, placing emphasis on Stevenson as a Scottish poet and arguing for his best verse to be considered