Amateur Emigrant, by Robert Louis Stevenson
Amateur Emigrant, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Author: Stevenson R. L. Stevenson

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2019-08-07

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1474471951

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Definitive modern edition of Stevenson's intriguing account of his emigration from Scotland to CaliforniaThe Amateur Emigrant, an autobiographical account of Stevenson's voyage from Scotland to California in 1879, is a rich and provocative work of late-Victorian travel writing and cultural criticism. It describes vividly how Stevenson mixed with 'steerage' passengers aboard an Atlantic steamship and experienced the indignities of a transcontinental emigrant train. The Amateur Emigrant engages critically with Victorian ideas about class, race, and gender, and makes an important contribution to the literature of emigration. Stevenson's middle-class family and friends found the work so transgressive that it was withdrawn from publication at proof stage. It was published in bowdlerized form in 1895 and since then has rarely been available in the form in which Stevenson composed it. Key FeaturesUses the original manuscript as copy text, making available the work as Stevenson originally composed itScholarly introduction situates The Amateur Emigrant in relation to important biographical, critical, historical, social, and generic contexts, and offers a summary of key critical responsesProvides full textual apparatus including variant readings from hitherto unavailable 1880 proofs, textual essay, explanatory notes, and chronologyExciting new visual material including scans of the manuscript and proofs and a map of Stevenson's journey

Collecting, Curating, and Researching Writers' Libraries
Collecting, Curating, and Researching Writers' Libraries

Author: Richard W. Oram

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-05-21

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1442234989

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Academic collection practices in recent years have extended to the private libraries of notable individual authors. As a consequence, book historians have become more interested in the study of provenance of the contents of these libraries, while literary scholars have devoted more attention to authorial annotations. At the same time, the Internet has encouraged both scholarly and hobbyist reconstructions of private libraries (see, for example, the “Legacy Libraries” on Librarything.com). Although there are many bibliographies and reconstructions of the libraries of authors, this is the first general consideration of these libraries and serves as an introduction to best practices for academic libraries in their acquisition, cataloging and issues of access. This collection begins with principal editor Richard Oram’s historical overview of writers’ libraries and institutional collecting, focusing primarily on English-language authors. The co-editor, Joseph Nicholson, has provided a definitive review of best cataloging and arrangement practices that facilitate scholarly access. The bookseller Kevin Mac Donnell discusses the marketing of these collections and obstacles to placing intact author libraries in institutions. Also included are case studies by Amanda Golden and David Faulds relating to the personal libraries of the poets Anne Sexton and Ted Hughes, indicating how these collections have the potential to enhance archival research. Fiction writers Iain Sinclair, Russell Banks, Jim Crace, poet Ted Kooser, and biographer Ron Powers describe their (sometimes passionate) relationship with books and their own personal libraries. The concluding chapter, a location guide to over 500 individual libraries, will be invaluable to scholars and librarians who want to know where writers’ libraries are currently located, what happened to them (if they are known to have been sold or dispersed), and what has been written about them.

Literary Culture and the Pacific
Literary Culture and the Pacific

Author: Vanessa Smith

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1998-01-08

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 9780521573597

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This 1998 book examines a range of nineteenth-century European accounts from the Pacific, depicting Polynesian responses to imported metropolitan culture, in particular its technologies of writing and print. Texts designed to present self-affirming images of 'native' wonderment at European culture in fact betray the emergence of more complex modes of appropriation and interrogation by the Pacific peoples. Vanessa Smith argues that the Pacific islanders called into question the material basis and symbolic capacities of writing, even as they were first being framed in written representations. Examining accounts by beachcombers and missionaries, she suggests that complex modes of self-authorization informed the transmission of new cultural practices to the Pacific peoples. This shift of attention towards reception and appropriation provides the context for a detailed discussion of Robert Louis Stevenson's late Pacific writings.

Exploration and Exchange
Exploration and Exchange

Author: Jonathan Lamb

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 9780226468457

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This anthology places the works of such well-known figures as Captain James Cook and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside the writings of lesser-known explorers, missionaries, beachcombers, and literary travellers who roamed the South Seas from the late 17th through the late 19th centuries.