Memories and Portraits - Memories of Himself - Selection from his Notebook
Memories and Portraits - Memories of Himself - Selection from his Notebook

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Publisher: Read Books Ltd

Published: 2015-06-08

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 1473375592

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This book contains Robert Stevenson's 1887 work, "Memories and Portraits". It is a collection of essays that form an autobiographical sketch of this most esteemed author, and it will greatly appeal to those with an interest in his life and mind. The chapters of this book include: "The Foreigner at Home", "Some College Memories", "Old Morality", "Q College Magazine", "An Old Scotch Gardener", "Pastoral", "The Manse", "Memories of an Islet", "Thomas Stevenson", "Talk and Talkers: First Paper", "Talk and Talkers: Second Paper", etcetera. Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (1850 - 1894) was an influential Scottish writer who is most famous for writing "Treasure Island" and "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde". Many vintage texts such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now, in an affordable, high-quality, modern edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned biography of the author.

Exuberance
Exuberance

Author: Kay Redfield Jamison

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2004-09-28

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1400043743

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With the same grace and breadth of learning she brought to her studies of the mind’s pathologies, Kay Redfield Jamison examines one of its most exalted states: exuberance. This “abounding, ebullient, effervescent emotion” manifests itself everywhere from child’s play to scientific breakthrough and is crucially important to learning, risk-taking, social cohesiveness, and survival itself. Exuberance: The Passion for Life introduces us to such notably irrepressible types as Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, and Richard Feynman, as well as Peter Pan, dancing porcupines, and Charles Schulz’s Snoopy. It explores whether exuberance can be inherited, parses its neurochemical grammar, and documents the methods people have used to stimulate it. The resulting book is an irresistible fusion of science and soul.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle
Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle

Author: J. Reid

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2006-06-28

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0230554849

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In this fascinating book, Reid examines Robert Louis Stevenson's writings in the context of late-Victorian evolutionist thought, arguing that an interest in 'primitive' life is at the heart of his work. She investigates a wide range of Stevenson's writing, including Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Treasure Island as well as previously unpublished material from the Stevenson archive at Yale. Reid's interpretation offers a new way of understanding the relationship between his Scottish and South Seas work. Her analysis of Stevenson's engagement with anthropological and psychological debate also illuminates the dynamic intersections between literature and science at the fin de siècle.

Romance
Romance

Author: Dana Percec

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2012-03-15

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1443838357

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Romance: The History of a Genre is a collection of essays devoted to the highly popular and no less controversial genre of romance. A genre often disregarded for its stereotypical language, shallow characters, and predictable plots, dismissed as “women’s” fiction, accused of conventionalism, romance is a genre which, after ups and downs in its millennial history, is now holding a leading position on the international bookselling market. This achievement has also been possible with the endorsement of contemporary media and modern technology, cinema, television, the Internet, etc. Much has been written in both traditional and more recent literary theory about the origins and evolution of the early forms of romance, from the classical Antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and into the Renaissance and early modernity in Western Europe. A corpus, which is becoming more and more substantial today, is already available about the gendered status of contemporary romance, both in terms of the writing ethos and in terms of reader response, with theories coming from the combined areas of feminism, social sciences, and psychoanalysis. The aim of the present volume is that of noting the fluid character of the genre, with the great number of subcategories, mixed and hybrid, bringing evidence to the polymorphous nature of contemporary popular culture. This book proposes, in four parts and twelve chapters, a fascinating and multifaceted journey into the history, substance and geography of romance. From its origins to the latest developments, from its subgenres to its features, from print to film, from television to Facebook, romance comes in various shapes and colours, which the reader can fully explore. The journey in the world of romance takes the reader from familiar corners to less familiar ones: from North America, Great Britain, Romania, or Turkey, to India or South Africa. The numerous approaches to romance generate diverse data, varied analytical frameworks and interesting, fresh and solidly grounded findings.

Animal Fables after Darwin
Animal Fables after Darwin

Author: Chris Danta

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-07-19

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1108664571

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The ancient form of the animal fable, in which the characteristics of humans and animals are playfully and educationally intertwined, took on a wholly new meaning after Darwin's theory of evolution changed forever the relationship between humans and animals. In this original study, Chris Danta provides an important and original account of how the fable was adopted and re-adapted by nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors to challenge traditional views of species hierarchy. The rise of the biological sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century provided literary writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Angela Carter and J. M. Coetzee with new material for the fable. By interrogating the form of the fable, and through it the idea of human exceptionalism, writers asked new questions about the place of the human in relation to its biological milieu.

Written Lives
Written Lives

Author: Javier Marías

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2007-05-17

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0811219364

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An affectionate and very funny gallery of twenty great world authors from the pen of "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Globe). In addition to his own busy career as "one of Europe's most intriguing contemporary writers" (TLS), Javier Marías is also the translator into Spanish of works by Hardy, Stevenson, Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov, and Laurence Sterne. His love for these authors is the touchstone of Written Lives. Collected here are twenty pieces recounting great writers' lives, "or, more precisely, snippets of writers' lives." Thomas Mann, Rilke, Arthur Conan Doyle, Turgenev, Djuna Barnes, Emily Brontë, Malcolm Lowry, and Kipling appear ("all fairly disastrous individuals"), and "almost nothing" in his stories is invented. Like Isak Dinesen (who "claimed to have poor sight, yet could spot a four-leaf clover in a field from a remarkable distance away"), Marías has a sharp eye. Nabokov is here, making "the highly improbable assertion that he is 'as American as April in Arizona,'" as is Oscar Wilde, who, in debt on his deathbed, ordered up champagne, "remarking cheerfully, 'I am dying beyond my means.'" Faulkner, we find, when fired from his post office job, explained that he was not prepared "to be beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp." Affection glows in the pages of Written Lives, evidence, as Marías remarks, that "although I have enjoyed writing all my books, this was the one with which I had the most fun."

Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson
Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson

Author: Penny Fielding

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2010-07-06

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0748635564

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This wide-ranging collection is the first to set Robert Louis Stevenson in detailed social, political and literary contexts.The book takes account of both Stevenson's extraordinary thematic and generic diversity and his geographical range. The chapters explore his relation to late nineteenth-century publishing, psychology, travel, the colonial world, and the emergence of modernism in prose and poetry. Through the pivotal figure of Stevenson, the collection explores how literary publishing and cultural life changed across the second half of the nineteenth century. Stevenson emerges as a complex writer, author both of hugely popular boys' stories and of seminally important adult novels, as well as the literary figure who debated with Henry James the theory of fiction and the nature of realism.The collection shows how interest in the unconscious and changes in the conception of childhood demand that we re-evaluate our ideas of his writing. Individual essays by international experts trace Stevenson' lit

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.

A Short Bright Flash: Augustin Fresnel and the Birth of the Modern Lighthouse
A Short Bright Flash: Augustin Fresnel and the Birth of the Modern Lighthouse

Author: Theresa Levitt

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2013-06-03

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 039306879X

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Describes the life of the man who invented a new lighthouse lens, capable of shining brighter, farther, and more efficiently than existing light sources, and his fight against the scientific elite, his poor health, and the limits of his era's technology.