Event Updates

The RLS Website was launched on 13 November 2009 to celebrate Stevenson’s birthday. The launch was held at the National Library of Scotland, who displayed the original Treasure Island map.

Speakers included Sir David Edward of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, Vice Principal Robin Mackenzie of Edinburgh Napier University, Prof Linda Dryden, Dr Hilary Grimes, Callum Egan, Dr John Cairney, Prof Roderick Watson, Prof Richard Dury and Prof Robert-Louis Abrahamson. Drinks, canapés and a Stevenson birthday cake was served, and guests had the opportunity to look at the website.

On 13 December 2009 the Robert Louis Stevenson Silverado Museum will celebrate the 40th year of its founding. The museum holds the second largest Stevenson collection (the largest collection is held in the Beinecke library at Yale University).

Conference Update

Locating Stevenson: The 6th Biennial Robert Louis Stevenson Conference, 8-10 July 2010, University of Stirling

To read more about the conference and how to submit an abstract, click here. You may also want to visit the conference website at http://www.rls2010.stir.ac.uk/.

Forthcoming Publications

European Stevenson, ed. by Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury (Cambridge Scholars Publications). Publication date: December 2009.

“Edinburgh, late 1860s. Two young gentlemen, two cousins, their heads buzzing with ideas and artistic ambitions (one dreaming of becoming a painter, the other a writer), hang over North Bridge ‘watching the trains start southward and longing to start too’, the Walter Scott Monument a short way behind them, but their eyes fixed on the tracks leading South—not just to London, but also, and especially, to Paris.”

In their Introduction the editors of this volume see this scene with his painter cousin as symbolically significant for the career of Robert Louis Stevenson and his connection with Europe—especially France; a connection that is a key to understanding his confidence to ignore the Scott Monument and start writing his major narratives in the 1880s and 90s.

The papers that follow explore the way Stevenson’s world-view and cultural background interacted with Europe: with European landscape (the South, the Alps and the areas of his French travel essays), and with European literature and painting. Other papers explore the later influence of Stevenson in Europe: not only on writers (Proust, Cocteau, Brecht and Calvino among others) and on other creative artists but even on travellers and travel-writers in the Cévennes.

The volume aims to show how European culture contributed to Stevenson’s greatest achievements and then to explain why, with Stevenson ignored by Anglo-American critics for most of the twentieth century, he remained an admired model for European writers.

Contributors: Richard Ambrosini, Richard Dury, Roslyn Jolly, Robert-Louis Abrahamson, Ann C. Colley, Laurence Davies, Lesley Graham, Morgan Holmes, Alan Sandison, Jean-Pierre Naugrette, Vincent Giroud, Cinzia Giglioni, Michela Vanon Alliata, Joachim Hemmerle, Guy Barefoot, Sara Rizzo.

A New Scholarly Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

A new scholarly edition of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (The New Edinburgh Edition) will be published by Edinburgh University Press from 2012 onwards. The General Editors are Stephen Arata (University of Virginia), Richard Dury (University of Bergamo) and Penny Fielding (University of Edinburgh).

The New Edinburgh Edition will consist of both printed volumes and electronic supplements (a full collation, manuscript transcriptions and additional notes) plus special electronic resources (showing, for example, the evolution of manuscript versions over time; images of the manuscripts, additional illustrations etc.). The volumes produced in the incomplete Centenary edition will be published in new editions.

The full edition will run to 38 volumes and it is hoped to publish it at the rate of 4 volumes a year over a ten-year period.

Recent Publications

Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad: Writers of Transition, ed. by Linda Dryden, Stephen Arata and Eric Massie (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2009).

"The first book-length study to specifically examine the many intersections in the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad, this volume extends the focus of current debate beyond the writers' South Seas literature. Considering Stevenson and Conrad's shared literary history and experience of Victorian London, it examines their convergence of styles in the emergent modernism of the fin-de-siecle, their romance and adventure modes, their fictions of duality, and their explorations of the human psyche.

Moreover, the book recuperates Stevenson's reputation as a serious writer, not only as Conrad's antecedent and influence but as a writer equally worthy of study in these shared modes."