The Robert Louis Stevenson Archive
Robert Louis Stevenson Studies 1998-2001
suggest an addition or correction to the list
Robert Louis Stevenson Studies 1998-2001
suggest an addition or correction to the list
Ambrosini,
Richard (2001). R.L. Stevenson: La poetica del romanzo [R.L. Stevenson:
Poetics of the novel]. Roma: Bulzoni.
[400 pp. ,
followed by 35 pages of Bibliography of Stevenson studies; covers all of
Stevenson’s work, paying particular attention to significant aspects that have
not yet been sufficiently discussed, for example the essays and the significant
change of theoretical approach in the early part of his career; Ch. 1: From
essayist to novelist: 1850-1880; Ch. 2: Treasure Island and the essays
on the romance: 1881-1885; Ch. 3: Kidnapped and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde:
1885-1886; Ch. 4: The Scribner’s Magazine essays and The Wrong Box:
1887-1888; Ch. 5: Myth, history and tragedy in The Master of Ballantrae;
Ch. 6: In the South Seas: 1888-1894; Ch. 7: Stevenson and the Twentieth
Century.
Barbalet, Jack (2001). ‘WJ and Robert Louis Stevenson: The Importance of Emotion’. Streams of William James 3ii: 6-9.
[William James extensively quotes Stevenson’s ‘The Lantern-Bearers’ in his lecture ‘On a Certain Blindness of Human Beings’ published in 1899. James scholars have tended to identify affinity of the two authors as centred on the validity of each personal point of view. This misses the clearly shared shared belief that ‘emotional engagement endues value, interest and meaning’ (7). Both writers ‘were extremely sensitive to the importance of emotions in human being and human becoming’ (9). ‘RLS demonstrates profound insight concerning the nature and significance of emotions’ (7), as in ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places’ he remarks that ‘We see places through our humours as through differently coloured glasses. We are ourselves a term in the equation’.
Beattie, Hilary J. (2001). ‘Father
and Son: the Origins of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. The
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 56: 317-360.
[In Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert
Louis Stevenson created, out of one of his own dreams, the most famous
pre-Freudian case study of the divided self. The present essay explores the
roots of that work in Stevenson’s lifelong difficulty in separating from his
moody, conflicted, and passionately possessive father. Out of a matrix of
religious guilt and social conformity, Stevenson struggled to create and define
his own identity as a writer, a struggle that ran counter to many of his
beloved father’s deepest needs and led to sharp clashes, accompanied by periods
of severe depressive and physical illness in both. Stevenson’s creative block
during his father’s final depression and dementia was broken only by the
nightmare that became ‘Jekyll and Hyde’, which enabled him to give enduring
literary expression to the disavowed rage, guilt, and sense of deformity and
fractured identity endemic to their internalized relationship. It may also have
functioned as an act of exorcism and expiation that helped him recover rapidly
from his father’s death and exploit more productively the few years that were
left to him.. See also Beattie 1998]
Bender, Adrianne Noel (2001). ‘Mapping
Scotland’s identities: Representations of national landscapes in the novels of
Scott, Stevenson, Oliphant, and Munro’. PhD dissertation at New York University
(AAT 3009283).
[Much of Scotland’s interior remained unmapped and
uncharted until the Military Survey of Scotland began in 1747, one year after
Scotland suffered its final defeat at the hands of the English at the Battle of
Culloden. The mapping of Scotland became an act of appropriation and domination
over a national “other,” as the English and Lowland Scots attempted to
delineate the remote Highland landscape, often viewed as uncivilized and
barbaric in the British imagination. But in opening up this seeming wasteland,
the maps of Scotland often performed a cultural emptying of that space as they
tended to de-emphasize the individuals and communities residing in it.
It is the nineteenth-century
historical novel that re-fills the supposedly empty spaces of Scotland’s
landscape with a national history and a new national identity at a time when
Scotland seems increasingly at risk of losing its autonomy within the larger
land of Great Britain. Through representations of Scotland’s different
landscapes in the novel, from the Highlands and Lowlands to the city and
country estate, the novelist attempts a more complete map of the Scottish
interior. The novelist defines not only a geographical space, but a changing
historical, cultural, and ideological space throughout historical time.
As the novelist faces many of the
same challenges as the cartographer and often finds inspiration in maps and
map-making, Scottish cartography becomes a useful framework for studying how
the novel imagines the nation through what M. M. Bakhtin has defined as the
chronotope, or the intersection of time and space. As it begins with Walter
Scott and develops throughout the century with writers such as Margaret
Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Neil Munro, the historical novel portrays
a land situated in an uneasy place between nationhood and empire, between an
independent Scotland and a united Great Britain. A study of the Scottish novel
is particularly relevant at the beginning of the twenty-first century as
Scotland adjusts to its first parliament in almost three hundred years.
Scottish writers can envision a national future through a dialogue with the
past, although that past is often imagined through the ideological perspectives
of its creators.]
Gordon K Booth (2001). ‘The Strange Case of Mr Stevenson and Professor Smith.’ Aberdeen University Review 59: 386-97.
On-line at (i) http://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/corpus/search/document.php?documentid=683
And at (ii) http://www.gkbenterprises.fsnet.co.uk/papers/rlswrs.htm (where it is re-titled ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and William Robertson Smith: A Study In Contrast’).
[Explores the amusing personality clash between R. L. Stevenson and William Robertson Smith when the latter attempted to initiate Stevenson into the mysteries of physics at Edinburgh University
Both WRS and RLS contributed to the new edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. RLS supplied ‘Jean de Béranger’ and ‘Robert Burns’ (rejected); WRS’s entry on ‘Bible’ was a key entry that began the liberation of English-language Bible criticism from literalism. The two possibly met again, since in 1875 they were elected members of the Savile Club, where both stayed during visits to London. RLS mentions ‘Smith o’ Aiberdeen!’ in his Thomson-Johnson poem ‘The Scotsman’s return from abroad’ (Underwoods, 1887).
‘Smith successfully adapted his Scottish Calvinist inheritance to meet the challenge of his intellectual explorations; Stevenson, on the other hand, never truly escaped its chill hand.’ WRS was the ‘new theologian’ who instigated a paradigmatic shift in theological study of the Bible by introducing the scientific study of Bible into English-speaking countries He also contributed to sociology and social anthropology and was “the founder of religious anthropology”.]
Cleto, Fabio (2001). ‘Lo “strano” caso di Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. Cleto, Fabio (2001). Percorsi del disenso nel secondo ottocento britannico. Genova: ECIG. Pp. 195-212.
Comellini, Carla (2001). ‘La mappa come metafora del testo letterario: l’eredità di R. L. Stevenson, J. Conrad, R. Kipling in G. Greene e M. Ondaatje’ [The map as metaphor of the literary text: the influence of R. L. Stevenson and J. Conrad on G. Greene and M. Ondaatje]. Il lettore di provincia 32, 110/111 (gennaio/agosto 2001): 53-63.
[‘The man who was perhaps the finest writer in the English language […] wrote a timeless classic of young adult fiction (Treasure Island), two and a half other novels of the first rank (Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the unfinished Weir of Hermiston), a classic children’s book of poems (A Child’s Garden of Verses), and a first-rate travel book (Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes).
He was additionally a fine essayist, a prescient political reporter […], a skilled social anthropologist, a maker of historical fiction in the vein of his countryman Sir Walter Scott, an early practitioner of modernist fiction (The Beach of Falesá), a sharp-eyed chronicler of nature and landscape, a biographer (of a beloved college professor), a historian (of Edinburgh), a prolific and hilarious letter writer, a composer of deft and poignant prayers, and even the author of popular horror stories (The Merry Men) […]
And all this in two decades […]
Considering that the man threw fastballs in most every literary genre there is, and considering that none of the many writers of genius we know threw such high heat in so many ballparks, it seems to me we might account the grinning Scotsman with the tubercular cough and cigarette and stories always on his lips to be maybe the best writer our language has known; or at least the most comprehensively accomplished.’ (47-8)]
Harris, Jason Marc (2001). ‘Folklore, fantasy, and fiction: The function
of supernatural folklore in nineteenth and early twentieth-century British
prose narratives of the literary fantastic’. PhD dissertation at University of
Washington (AAT 3013967). Esp. Ch 8: Stevenson, Folklore and Imperialism pp.398-433
[This dissertation reveals the important role of folk
beliefs and motifs, adapted from traditional legends and fairy tales, in
Victorian and Edwardian fantastic prose. Literary fairy tales and legends
appropriate and reshape folkloric elements into texts that demonstrate the
cultural instability of their historical eras. These hybrid literary forms
indicate the self-consciousness of the literary culture that produced them; the
very hesitation of the fantastic mode of writing highlights conflicts between
ideological progressivism and social introspection. The adoption of folk tales
casts both glamour and a shadow upon the pretensions of utopian visions.
Superstition challenges reason throughout the narratives of folkloric fantasy.
British bourgeois and elite culture
scrutinizes both the implications of social reform--liberating an unruly
underclass and its traditions--and of anthropological insights into global
interconnections that erode the illusion of English superiority. Robert Louis
Stevenson, for example, portrays the ties between native folklore and British
imperialism. Similarly, writers of the Celtic Renaissance, like William Sharp,
negotiate with Irish and Scottish folk traditions, attempting to create an
aesthetic that could defy English cultural imperialism without succumbing to
nationalistic insularity. Walking the writer’s tightrope between preternatural
folklore and literary respectability results in a variety of rhetorical
strategies that produce multiple forms of the fantastic. Authors of Victorian
and Edwardian literary fairy tales and fantasies find or formulate through folk
motifs the optimistic or pessimistic images of socio-economic and domestic
reform that they envision, while ironically dismissing the marvellous details
of folk narratives that threaten to trivialize their prophetic or satirical
voices.
As for the realistic appropriations
of legends and folk beliefs, gaps appear between the worldview of the narrator
and folk informants in the works of William Carleton, Sheridan Le Fanu, and
James Hogg. Narrative authority itself lies suspended in cultural
uncertainty--dangling between two competing views of reality. Psychological and
metaphysical explanations for the fantastic frequently clash within these
texts, just as competing cultural and political perceptions from England,
Ireland, Scotland, India, and the South Seas Islands lead to crises of
interpretation. The logic of folk superstitions subverts--and expands--the
borders of British literary culture.]
Hubbard, Tom (2001). ‘Edimbourg-la-Morte:
the Fantastic and Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson’. Etudes Ecossaises [Univ. Grenoble] 6 (issue devoted to ‘L’Etrange. Le merveilleux. Le surnaturel’): 21-27.
[Dickens
and Stevenson both made contributions to the fantastic genre located in
Edinburgh: ‘The Story of the
Bagman’s Uncle’ in Pickwick Papers (apparition/drunken dream in Leith
Walk), and David Balfour’s meeting with the spae-wife (‘foreteller’) at a
nearby spot. The protagonists differ greatly, however, and the episode in Catriona
is interelated closely with the whole text. Stevenson’s descriptions (in this
episode, and also in ‘The Body Snatcher’ and ‘Tod Lapraik’s Tale’) also aim at
‘significant simplicity’ in contrast to Dickens’s magnificent excess.
This simplicity, combined with the
uncertain distinction between real and unreal, gives Stevenson’s work a power
of suggestiveness much appreciated by Marcel Schwob, who presents him ‘as - in
effect - a proto-Symboliste’. Georges Rodenbach’s Symbolist novel, Bruges-la-Morte
(1892) also has affinities with Stevenson’s work: ‘the somewhat camp bizarrerie
of the prose style’, confusions of identity and labyrinthine setting.]
Hirsch, Gordon (2001). ‘The Travels
of RLS as a Young Man’. The Victorian Newsletter 99 (Spring 2001): 1-7.
[A
study of Stevenson’s early travel books, An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels
with a Donkey (1879), and the author’s search for identity. In his first book,
Stevenson explores how he will define himself--with what social class, vocation,
and group he will identify. He remains, however, fluid, protean, unformed, and
without any real relationships, not even with his traveling companion. In
contrast, Travels with a Donkey is primarily about Stevenson’s difficult
relationship with his wilful donkey, Modestine (who can be seen as a way of
talking about his relationship with Fanny Osbourne): Stevenson expresses both
attachment and affection towards his donkey, as well as anger and frustration
at her obstinacy and wilfulness. In the end, both these early travel books are
as much about questions of identity and self-definition as about scenes of
travel.]
Honaker, Lisa (2001). ‘The
Revisionary Role of Gender in R. L. Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights and Prince
Otto: Revolution in a “Poison Bad World” ‘. English Literature in
Transition (1880-1920) 44iii: 297-319.
[In New Arabian Nights and
Prince Otto, Stevenson identifies the obstacles that late-nineteenth
century domestic life mounts for the sorts of characters and adventures the
traditional romance paradigm offers.
This article argues that Stevenson both challenges realism and rewrites
romance by reversing and then righting gender roles in these two works. In both, he offers portraits of effeminate
men, whose domestically developed characters make them incapable of action, and
masculine women, who have been forced into action by these deficient
heroes. The article argues that
Stevenson contains the threat such women pose in and to romance by having them
orchestrate the revolution that brings a more manly race of heroes to
power. This action refuses women the
desire for power they wield so effectively in these works. At the same time it
makes the point that domesticity must be overthrown in order to restore romance
and manhood.]
Klein, Georg (2001). ‘Robert Louis
Stevenson (Schundautor)’ [Robert Louis Stevenson (writer of trash literature)].
Frankfurter Rundschau 3 März 2001, N. 53: 23.
[Novelist Georg
Klein offers a series of provocative thoughts about the misinterpretation of Jekyll
and Hyde and the poverty of psychoanalytic criticism. By Schundautor
he presumably means “author who has been implicitly placed in the category of
trash literature by those who have used his works for unsubtle derivative
works” (Jekyll he thinks is probably “the most-adapted work of all
literature”). Klein is opposed to reductive psychological interpretation of the
text (found specially in film adaptations) and sees the essence of Hyde as
instability of form (hence his indescribability and the futility of Lanyon’s
“Compose yourself!”). “Hyde is a medium”, just as the personality is a medium
(though we would like it to be fixed) and just as literature too a medium, not
something that can be trapped in a cabinet and easily defined.]
Kucich, John (2001). ‘Melancholy Magic: Masochism,
Stevenson, Anti-Imperialism’. Nineteenth Century Literature 56iii:
364-400.
[This study uses relational psychoanalysis [which
stresses the importance of relations with others, rather than internal drives]
and historicist methods [which sees cultural history in terms of social and
historical context] to show how Stevenson revised the ideological function of
Victorian masochism as a class-coded discourse.]
Lamb, Jonanthan, Vanessa Smith &
Nicholas Thomas (eds.) (2001). Exploration and Exchange. A South Seas
Anthology, 1680-1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[a
selection of writings of British and American visitors to the Pacific; divided
into three sections, ‘adventurers and explorers’, ‘beachcombers and
missionaries’ and ‘literary travellers’, each preceded by an authoritative
introduction]
Larson, Matthew Allen (2001). ‘Text/music
relations in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ ‘Songs of Travel’: An interpretive guide’.
DMA dissertation at Arizona State University (AAT 3004121). Chapters devoted to
each poem/song.
[Preparation of art song for performance requires
intensive collaborative effort by both the singer and the pianist. This
preparation should include a thorough study of the text as well as the music. The
relationship between the composer’s music and the poet’s words is the key to
discovering the interpretive intentions of the composer, as well as making
informed musical decisions regarding the performance of the work.
Songs
of Travel for baritone and piano, composed in 1904 by
Ralph Vaughan Williams on poems of Robert Louis Stevenson, is an example of
song cycle, a set of art songs that are connected musically, textually, or
both. The songs were intended by the composer to be performed as a unit. The
texts were chosen by the composer from a larger collection of poems of the same
title, and were arranged in a particular order that suggests a chronology of
events in the life of the protagonist. This particular song cycle employs
recurring musical ideas while maintaining the independence of each piece. The
story is told by a narrator, represented by the baritone, who has abandoned
civilized society in favor of a life of wandering. His development as a person,
and the effect the events of each song has upon his personal journey, are
reflected through the use of returning musical themes, specific harmonic
devices, and other compositional tools with which Vaughan Williams suggests
dramatic direction.
This research paper focuses on an
analysis of text/music relations in each of the nine Songs of Travel.
Specific musical ideas have been highlighted, possible connections between
these figures and the poetry have been explored, and a dramatic progression of
the story has been extrapolated. The end of each chapter presents interpretive
suggestions for performance based upon those findings. ]
Meunier, Jacques (2001). ‘Stevenson et ses “brownies”‘. Le Monde/Le
Monde des Livres 1 juin 2001 : I.
[Whole-page review of Stevenson Oeuvres, I (Gallimard/Pléiade 2001) and Manguel (2001;
see ‘R.L. Stevenson in fiction’ page) in the form of a general survey and
appreciation of the writer’s works. Here are some of the felicitous
formulations in translation: ‘a mythical writer, symbol of a new idea of
literature’; ‘he seduces children, adults and academics’; ‘this prose which has
a fine link with trance and hypnosis’; ‘strange to see such a one in the form
of a missal’ [ironic reference to the de luxe thin-paper Pléiade volumes];
‘more sensitive to performance [parole – perhaps this could also be
translated as ‘the physical manifestation of the word’] than to discourse [discours
– perhaps this just means ‘large textual units’], lover of ellipsis, allusion,
litotes’; ‘the urgency [in the writing of Jekyll] leads to a sort of
unfinishedness that Stevenson aimed at’.]
Odden, Karen Marie (2001). ‘Broken trains of thought: The railway crash, trauma and narrative in
British fiction, 1848-1910’. PhD dissertation at New York University (AAT
3009342).
[The Victorian railway
occupied an extraordinary position in the public imagination because it altered
nearly every aspect of culture from food distribution to ways of
conceptualizing space and time. By mid-century the train was also available as
a metaphor for certain types of plots, particularly those in realist novels.
Beginning in the 1850s, Victorian railway crashes and injury trials compelled
dozens of Victorian medical, legal and railway professionals to write treatises
in which they discuss issues such as causality, agency, credibility and the
need for supplemental narratives. Because these are also narrative concerns,
novelists such as M. E. Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, R. L.
Stevenson and Anthony Trollope used railway crashes, both mechanical and
financial, to introduce questions concerning the category of traumatic injury
and to work out aspects of their own craft. Specifically, these writers
developed narrative devices that plot the kind of rupture that we associate
with trauma by producing psychological complexity. The experiential category
that Freud called trauma became an organizing fiction that enabled writers in
the medical, legal and literary professions to make sense of modern catastrophe
and loss in a new way.]
Ricks, Christopher (2001). ‘A Note
on “The Hollow Men” and Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide’. Essays in
Criticism 51i: 8-17.
[In an undergraduate essay T.S. Eliot praises The Ebb-Tide (which
combines ‘truth and strangeness’) and in a review of Chesterton (1927) he is
disappointed that no-one has produced ‘a critical essay showing that Stevenson
is a writer of permanent importance, and why’. Ricks claims that ‘The
Ebb-Tide may well have been among the prompters of “The Hollow Men”
(1925)’: (i) both include a quotation of (or allusion to) the nursery rhyme
‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’ by an adult speaker, emphasizing a grim
distance from childhood; (ii) both works are about ‘hollow men’ (Davis, Huish);
(iii) many slight linguistic and thematic parallels between Stevenson’s Chapter
11 and Eliot’s poem.]
Roblin, Isabelle (2001). “The
Strange Cases of Emma Tennant’s Two Women of London (1989) and Valerie
Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990)”. Alizés [Université de
la Réunion] (ed. Eileen Wanquet) ***: ***
[A
study of the significant differences between Stevenson’s story and the texts by
Tennant and Martin]
Robson, Catherine (2001). Men in
Wonderland : The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman.
Princeton/London: Princeton UP.
[The anxieties of ‘Maiden Tribute’ scandal
reflected in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, pp. 154-6.]
Scarpa,
Domenico (2001). ‘L’arcipelago’. Introduction to Stevenson, R.L., L’isola
del tesoro [Treasure Island]. Milano: Feltrinelli.
[A survey of Stevenson’s
reception and influence in Italy: Cecchi, Praz, Pavese, Silvio D’Arzo, Calvino,
Manganelli, Mari]
Waterston, Elizabeth (2001). Rapt
in Plaid: Canadian Literature and Scottish Tradition. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
[Imitations
and transformations of Scottish literary influence are “set in the context of
multi-cultural, narrative, postmodern and postcolonial theories. This study
illuminates the way Scottish ideas and values still wield surprising power in
Canadian politics, education, theology, economics and social mores.” Includes a
chapter “Stevenson and the Garden of Childhood”]
Zerweck, Bruno (2001). ‘Historicizing unreliable narration: unreliability and cultural discourse in narrative fiction’. Style 35i: 1-23
[The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Master of Ballantrae ‘play a major part in the development of unreliable narration in British fiction. Although until recently they have been largely underrated, Stevenson’s novels with their skeptical questioning of representation and innovative use of old forms make him an important precursor of Modernism” (p. 9).]
2000
Abi-Ezzi, Nathalie (2000). ‘An Analysis of the Treatment of the
Double in the Work of Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins and Daphne du
Maurier.’ Ph.D. thesis, King’s College, University of London.
[Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins and Daphne du
Maurier are authors of particular importance to the literature of the double.
Each also rejected the prevailing social order of his or her time, a factor
that plays an important role in determining how the double is represented and
treated. While Northrop Frye’s accepted theory of romance narrative structure
follows the hero’s journey through a dark ‘descent’ to a happier ‘ascent’, the
thesis shows that this applies to a largely masculine identity. The rise of the
female persona and her relation to the double (a progression charted through
the works of these three authors) leads to an extraordinary alteration in this
traditional narrative structure, and an exploration of new ways in which the
imprisoned female character may be able to “free” herself.
The opening chapter of this study
divides the influences on Stevenson, Collins and du Maurier into two areas: the
religious, and the romantic/Gothic (discussing topics such as the double in
Greek mythology, the hero and sibling relations in the Old Testament, and
Romantic and Gothic literature). The second chapter deals with works by
Stevenson in which the double plays an important role. The objective of the
double as outlined by Northrop Frye never reaches fruition in Stevenson’s work,
although many of the themes that Frye connects with the double are indeed
present. This is seen to be a result of the author’s literary reliance on the
religious scheme from which he is never able to sufficiently detach himself,
and which bears directly on his relationship to his father. The adventure
stories, the Scottish tales, the tales of superstition, and the city-bound
narratives are all shown to be related by the pivotal position of the patriarch
and all that he represents. Chapters three and four go on to examine Collins’
and du Maurier’s radical treatment of the double.]
Alig, W. B. (2000). ‘Edinburgh’s Own St Ives’. In
Steele (ed) (2000): 35-38.
[Edinburgh in St Ives].
Atkinson, Damian (ed.) (2000). The
Selected Letters of W.E. Henley. Ashgate (1 84014 634 6) £52.50
[contains
‘almost forty letters from Henley to RLS, many of them published for the first
time’]
Borges, Jorge Luis (ed. Martín Arias y Martín Hadis) (2000).Borges profesor. Curso de Literatura Inglesa de la Universidad de Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires: Emecé. (transl. Michel Lafon) Cours de littérature anglaise (2006). Paris: Seuil. (transl. Irene Buonafalce & Glauco Felici) (2006). Jorge Luis Borges: La biblioteca inglese, lezioni sulla letteratura. Enaudi (Saggi 876). Ch. 24-5, pp. 305-21. (Apparently not yet translated into English.)
Borges taught at Buenos Aires University from 1955 to 1970. In 1966 his students recorded and then transcribed his course of English literature, in which, he admits, his aim was not to teach literature, but the love of literature: ‘Yo he enseñado, no literatura inglesa, sino el amor a esa literatura. O mejor dicho, ya que la literatura es virtualmente infinita, el amor a ciertos libros, a ciertas páginas, quizá de ciertos versos’. Of the 25 lessons Borges gave on English literature gave in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires; the last two are on Stevenson. ]
Buckton, Oliver (2000). ‘Reanimating
Stevenson’s Corpus’. Nineteenth-Century Literature 55i (June 2000):
22-58.
[The
reanimated corpse plays a central role in The Wrong Box (1889), and also
surfaces in Treasure Island (1883), The Master of Ballantrae
(1889) and The Ebb-Tide (1893-4). Reanimation breaks taboos about (i) comic
treatment of death, and (ii) allusions to male homosexuality, and also (iii)
opposes itself to the 19th-century realist aesthetic and conventions
of narrative closure. The corpse is associated with indefinite deferral of
narrative closure and with the hollowness of character in Stevenson’s romance
style. The disruptive effects of the reanimated corpse thus helps to explain
the difficulty of containing Stevenson in conventional literary ‘boxes’.]
Campbell, James (2000). ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’. New York Times Nov 5, 2000. [JC, author of Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin and This Is the Beat Generation, discusses the life and works of RLS.] http://mural.uv.es/agipe/Lifeworks.html, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E1D91E31F936A35752C1A9669C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
Carter, Ronald & John McRae
(general editors). (2000). Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Harmondsworth: Penguin
(Penguin Student Editions)
[students’
guide: main ideas and themes; the main characters; language; key events in the
narrative; further reading]
Collobert, Youenn (2000). “The Lighthouse by the Castle : A Glimpse of Modernism in Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights”. Mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Rennes.
Cookson, Gillian (2000).
‘Engineering Jekyll and Hyde’. In Steele (ed) (2000): 21-24
[‘most of the characters in Jekyll and Hyde
bear the names of engineers’; reprinted from Notes & Queries 244(4),
Dec. 1999].
Deyts, Pierre
(2000). ‘Le Trésor dans l’île, thème de fiction narrative’. Thèse de doctorat,
Université de Bordeaux. Published
Villeneuve d’Ascq: Les Presses du Septentrion, 2001
[A study the ‘treasure island’: Le Comte de Mont-Cristo,
by Alexandre Dumas, Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Hergé’s Tintin story
Le Secret de la Licorne (The Secret of the Unicorn).]
Driscoll, Lawrence (2000). Reconsidering Drugs:
Mapping Victorian and Modern Drug Discourses. New York/Basingstoke:
Palgrave/St. Martin’s. ISBN 0-312-22272-6.
[Contains a brief section on Jekyll and Hyde in
the section ‘Seeking Mr Hyde’ (pp. 58-67). Hyde is seen as the ‘drugged Self’
and the text is interpreted as a way of coming to terms with drugs: ‘Stevenson
has offered us an opening in the rhetoric of drugs’ ]
Dury, Richard (2000). ‘The Spoken Words’, In Steele (ed) (2000): 10-13
[Stevenson’s voice quality and Scottish accent].
Edwards, Owen Dudley (2000).
‘Stevenson, Jekyll, Hyde and all the Deacon Brodies’. Folio [National
Library of Scotland] 1 (autumn 2000): 9-12.
[Jekyll and Hyde inspirations/anticipations:
(i) auto-experiment with chloroform by James Simpson (father of S’s friend), (ii)
Brodie’s Act III speech (1880 text) ‘we have all our secret evil. Only mine has
broken loose; it is my maniac brother who has slipped his chain’, (iii)
emphasis in Brodie given to door and window, (iv) S’s desire in the1888
text not to make Brodie pure evil]
Falconer-Salkeld, Bridget (2000). ‘Manasquan
Re-Visited’. In Steele (ed) (2000): 45-9.
[research on RLS’s stay at Brielle/ Manasquan in 1888].
Fitzpatrick, Elayne Wareing (2000). Robert Louis Stevenson’s Ethics for
Rascals.
Philadelphia: Xlibris (Random House). ISBN: 0-7388-3548-X (Trade Paperback, $16),
0-7388-4443-8 (Hardback, $25), 0-7388-9418-4 (eBook, $8)
[“introduction to the ... playful philosophy of the prince of storytellers”;
more information at www.xlibris.com, including an excerpt from the book]
Ginzburg, Carlo (2000). ‘Tusitala
and His Polish Reader’. No Island is an Island: Four glances at English
Literature in a world perspective. New York: Columbia UP.
[See
Ginzburg 1999]
Goudemare, Sylvain (2000). Marcel Schwob ou les vies imaginaires. Paris: Le Cherche-Midi éditeur. (ISBN 2-86274-819-6, 139 F / 21,19
euros)
[‘a
factual, but perceptive approach’, J-P Naugrette; Schwob ‘s pioneering role as
RLS critic is given its right place; correspondence with RLS; planned stage
version of JH]
Guttmacher, Alan E., and Callahan,
Joan R. (2000). ‘Did Robert Louis Stevenson have hereditary hemorrhagic
telangiectasia?’. American Journal of Medical Genetics 91:62-65.
[S and
his mother possibly suffered from HHT rather than tuberculosis or
bronchiectasis, though current information is insufficient to prove this]
Huftier, Arnaud (2000). ’Une traduction de la négation. R. L. Stevenson par Théo Varlet’. Le Rocambole 11, (été 2000) (‘Stratégies de traduction’).
Jackson, Darren (2000). ‘“The Beach
of Falesá” and the Colonial Enterprise’. Limina 6: 72-84.
[Explores the place of Stevenson’s “Falesá” in the
colonialist enterprise by examining it and modern historiography about the
nineteenth-century Pacific Islands. The author concludes that although
Stevenson overturns his readers’ expectations by exposing the white traders as
savages, he doesn’t go all the way in his anti-imperialist message, since he
presents the islanders as not capable of acting for themselves: he fails to
present the indigenous islanders as agents rather than objects. This shows the
pervasive nature of imperialist ideology in this period.]
Jones, Jnr, William B. (2000). ‘Speech Balloons and Forty Eight Pages. Robert Louis Stevenson in Classics Illustrated’. In Steele (ed) (2000): 25-30.
Katz, Wendy R. and Lilian Falk (2000).
‘George Hutchinson, a Canadian Illustrator of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure
Island’. Canadian Children’s Literature, no. 96, vol. 25iv: 11-27.
[“Nova
Scotia artist George Hutchinson illustrated a serial version of Treasure
island, the first to be illustrated by a single hand, for Chums magazine
in 1894-95.”]
Le Bris, Michel (2000). Pour saluer
Stevenson. Paris:
Flammarion. 120FF (ISBN - 2-08-067973-2)
[collection of Le
B’s interesting introductions to his translations of S with some additional
chapters; Presbyterianism and Convenanting writers - Childhood & relations
with father - Edinburgh - NAN - BA - travel writing - AmEm, AP, SS - essays on
writing - Samoa - Fal]
McNally, Raymond T. & Radu R. Florescu (2000). In Search of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books. [Claims to have found the ‘real’ Dr Jekyll in Deacon Brodie. Includes lists of derivative works. Quotes other scholars without acknowledgement.]
Mehew, Ernest (2000). ‘Glimpses of Stevenson’s Childhood’, In Steele (ed.) (2003): 5-9.
Phillips, Lawrence.(2000). ‘The Canker of Empire: Colonialism, Autobiography and the Representation of Illness: Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson in the Marquesas’. Laura Chrisman and Benita Parry (eds.) (2000). Postcolonial Theory and Criticism. Cambridge: Brewer, 115-132.
Mourier, M. (2000). ‘Le Maître de Ballantrae’. Quinzaine Littéraire 798 (Dec. 15): 13-14.
Nash, Andrew (2000). ‘Two
Unpublished Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson’. Notes and Queries n.s.
47iii (Sept. 2000): 334- 336.
[Two
1887 business letters to Chatto & Windus about Memories and Portraits,
one just before 28 July with a list of contents, decision about the title and
uncertainty about the inclusion of “Thomas Stevenson”; one 21 August
recognising receipt of proofs for M & P and appointing Baxter his
financial agent; Andrew Nash estimates S’s earnings on M &P as £200
during his lifetime]
Naugrette, Jean-Pierre (2000). ‘L’Étrange
cas du doutor Pereira et du docteur Cardoso: essai sur la fonction cognitive et
politique d’un mythe littéraire’. La Licorne
[UFR Langues Littératures, Université de Poitiers] No. 55: 277-292
[the
‘literary myth’ structuring Tabucchi’s Sostiene Pereira (1994) is
Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde: Dr Cardoso has studied the same French
medical thinkers who must have influenced Stevenson and proposes a model of the
psyche with distinct echoes of Jekyll’s ‘Statement’; and Pereira’s unease
derives from feelings of doubleness in the difficult situation of 1938.
The novel’s intertextual references include not only Pessoa, but also
Stevenson, subject of another short fictional text by Tabucchi in 1992]
Neil, Roger (2000). ‘Mr Nerli, Canty Kerlie’. In
Steele (ed) (2000): 18-20.
[Nerli and his portraits of RLS].
Newport, Barry (2000). ‘A Weevil in a Biscuit: Robert Louis Stevenson and Bournemouth’. Antquarian Book Monthly Review 27x: 10-14.
Richardson, Ruth (2000). ‘Silent pirates
of the shore: Robert Louis Stevenson and medical negligence’. The Lancet 356 (Dec. 23 2000): 2171-75.
[ ‘Robin and Ben: or, the Pirate and the Apothecary’
‘parodies the style and genre of the Victorian moral tale’, presenting us with
two kinds of rogue. The personal experience that may have inspired the attack
on the superior but dishonest apothecary is probably the ‘fine gentleman’
chemist on Broadway whom he consulted for ‘the itch’ (probably scabies) after
the transatlantic crossing, and who ‘with admirable gravity’ sold him a series
of worthless remedies (including ‘a little bottle of some salt and colourless
fluid’). Stevenson in the poem condemns ‘the arrogance
of malignant unconcern’. ]
Scally, John (2000). ‘Writing Around the
World’. In Steele (ed) (2000): 31-34.
[the annotations by RLS in the NLS copies of Virginibus Puerisque
and Underwoods identifying the place of composition of each piece].
[Expanding and adapting literary themes and techniques from her voracious reading, Cather selected and crafted them in her fiction, creating a literary braid incorporating the treasure-seeking quest from Stevenson, the motif of eternal youth from Barrie, the gothic mode from Poe. These contribute to Cather’s definition of the Kingdom of Art and her own journey to and through that kingdom.]
Shedden, John (2000), ‘Playing the Part’. In
Steele (ed) (2000): 14-17
[the author’s experience of a one-man-play on RLS].
Smith, Andrew (2000). Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy, and
Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century. Basingstoke/New York: Macmillan/St.
Martins Press.
[Publisher’s presentation: “Applying
ideas drawn from contemporary critical theory, this book historicizes
psychoanalysis through a new, and significant theorization of the Gothic. The
central premise is that the nineteenth-century Gothic produced a radical
critique of accounts of sublimity and Freudian psychoanalysis. This book makes
a major contribution to an understanding of both the nineteenth century and the
Gothic discourse which challenged the dominant ideas of that period. Writers explored include Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan
Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker.”]
Sorensen, Janet (2000). ‘“Belts of
God” and “Twenty-Pounders”: Robert Louis Stevenson’s textualized economies’. Criticism
42iii: 279-297.
[An attempt to read Stevenson’s Kidnapped in terms of prevailing
representations of English and Scottish cultures, focusing in particular on the
distinct economic and symbolic economies assigned to each space. It argues that,
although ambivalent, Stevenson’s text does offer moments of critique of
conventional representations of England and Scotland as occupying distinct and
mutually exclusive symbolic economies. Instead, his texts suggest a remarkably
prescient understanding of the global network in which representations of
distinct English and Scottish symbolic economies must be situated.]
Sorensen, Janet (2000). The
Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
[The Introduction opens with a familiar quotation from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde:
‘If I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically
both’. Placing Jekyll/Hyde in the long line of self-divided Scottish literary
characters, Sorensen claims that ‘Frequently, the fault line of their vexed
multiplicity is most recognisable in language’ (1). Indeed, the language-use of
the two protagonists in JH is capable of both producing and concealing
identities: J supplies H with a signature by altering his own ‘hand’; H is able
to forge J’s signature on the cheque. An essential difference, however, is
marked by Hyde’s body and associated voice. This is similar to the
situation of 18th-century educated Scots: able to “pass” as English
in writing, though aware that their voice remains ‘a telltale sign, revealing
their non-English status’ (1). ]
Steele, Karen (2000). The Robert
Louis Stevenson Club 150th Birthday Anniversary Book. Edinburgh:
privately printed for the Robert Louis Stevenson Club by AlphaGraphics.
[includes contributions listed separately here and
also: Anne Gray, ‘Chairman’s Thoughts’, 1; Stephen McKenna, ‘Tusitala’, 2
[speech at RLS Club dinner, 1924]; ‘A Birthday Gift’, 3-4 [RLS’s gift of his
birthday to Anne Ide, and the story of the gifting of the birthday to her niece
and her niece’s granddaughter]; William B. Jones, Jr, ‘RLS 2000: Why
Arkansas?’. 39-40 [background to the RLS 2000 Conference]; ‘Pleasantly Recalled
is R. L. Stevenson’s Stay’, 41-3 [reprinted from Asbury Park Evening Press
[New Jersey], ***, 1924; reminiscences of RLS’s stay at Brielle, NJ, in May
1888, annotated, and with two illustrations, by Bridget Falconer-Salkeld];
Bridget Falconer-Salkeld ‘Manasquan Re-Visited’, 45-9 [[research on RLS’s stay
at Brielle/ Manasquan in 1888];.Jim Winegar, ‘RLS in Samoa in the Year 2000’,
54-56 [from the President of the Vailima RLS Museum]; Karen Steele, ‘Food and
Drink’, 60-62 [quotations from RLS]; J . M. Barrie, from Rosaline Masson, I
Can Remember Robert Louis Stevenson, 1922, and letter to Rosaline Masson
(reprinted from unacknowledged source), beginning ‘It is a lasting regret to me
that I met RLS but once’, 57-58.]
Steele, Karen (2000). ‘A Visit to
Abemama’. In Steele (ed) (2000): 50-53.
[RLS in Abemama and a recent visit to the island].
Swearingen, Roger (2000). ‘Robert
Louis Stevenson’. In The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (3rd
edition, 2000). Vol. 4: 1800–1900 (ed. Joanne Shattock). CUP (0 521 39100 8).
[a guide to manuscript locations, bibliographies, collected works, details of
all individual works, contributions to periodicals, letters, journals etc.]
Wollen, Peter (2000). ‘The Archipelago of Metaphors’. Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures 10.ii: 261-275.
[Islands as metaphors in various literary works (Utopia, Robinson Crusoe, Melville’s ‘Enchanted Islands’, Treasure Island).]
1999
Ambrosini, Richard (in press,
probably 2000). ‘Stevenson e l’eticità dello scrivere per il mercato’. Atti
del Convegno AIA (Milano, settembre 1999).
[S the early
essayist showed an interest in a narrative with a universal foundation. The
first journey to America was a watershed in his thinking and his relationship
with the labouring masses and was followed by a desire for more ‘realism’ and
by his experiments with popular genres. These narratives were provocative
challenges to the emerging literary hierarchy and can be seen as part of a
parallel tradition to the élitist high-literature tradition]
Ambrosini, Richard (1999). ‘Lo specchio come psiche in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’. Lombardo, Agostino (a cura di) (1999). Gioco di Specchi: Saggi sull’uso letterario dell’immagine dello specchio. Roma: Bulzoni.
Clemens, Valdine (1999). The Return of the Repressed: Gothic
Horror from the Castle of Otranto to Alien. New York: State University of New York Press.
[‘Exploring the psychological and political
implications of Gothic fiction, Valdine Clemens focuses on some major works in
the tradition… She applies both psychoanalytic theory and sociohistorical
contexts to offer a fresh approach to Gothic fiction, presenting new insights
both about how such novels “work” and about their cultural concerns.’ ‘The Descent of Man and the Anxiety of Upward Mobility: The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, pp. 123-152.]
Cookson,
Gillian (1999). ‘Engineering
influences on Jekyll and Hyde.’ Notes and Queries, 46iv:
487-491.
[Sees
origin of names in JH as influenced by engineers that Stevenson would
have known or known about]
Cowan, Edward J. (1999). ‘“Intent upon my own race and place I wrote”: Robert Louis Stevenson and Scottish History’. In Edward J. Cowan & Douglas Gifford (eds.) (1999). The Polar Twins. Edinburgh: John Donald. 187-214.
[Publisher’s presentation: ‘These twelve essays cover Scottish history and literature throughout the centuries. Although, at first closely intertwined -- in that early historical sources were often literary and vice versa --
the contributors show how the aims of historians and writers diverged over the years. Ultimately, however, they show that literature and history do not lie at opposite ends of a spectrum in which history is seen simply
as a recorder of events and literature as escapist entertainment, but that both can offer complementary views of the past and are immensely interpretive of human experience.’
]
Daniel, Thomas M. (1999). ‘Stevenson’s Fingers’. Science. Vol. 286 Issue 5438 (10/08/99): 239.
[Comments on an article on the correlation between fourth-digit length and psychiatric depression (Manning & Dowrick) which had used the 1887 Sargent portrait of RLS, which shows slender fingers, the fourth digit the longest. However, the choice of Stevenson as an example of a depressed individual is not really tenable. Stevenson’s fingers are, however, of potential interest to medical historians for another reason. Some have have suggested that the recurrent symptom of spitting up blood from his lungs was due to bronchiectasis. However, bronchiectasis is commonly associated with clubbed fingers, which Sargent’s portrait demonstrates Stevenson definitely did not have. ]
Davidson, J.K. (1999). ‘Robert Louis
Stevenson and Golf’. Through the Green [Journal of the British Golf
Collectors Society] Sept 1999: 14-15
[Spyglass
Hill (Monterey) and Silverado (Napa Valley) Golf Courses; guttie golf ball with
‘RLS’ on it found near to Swanston]
[Deals with the reflections of colonial stereotypes in novels of adventure. Chapter IV is devoted to Treasure Island and analyzes in particular the “treasure topos”, one of the most revealing narrative covers to the colonial economic enterprise.]
Edmond, Rod (1999). Representing
the South Pacific. Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin. 521 55054 8.
CUP.
[“Edmond
shows how the form of R.L. Stevenson’s Pacific Fictions was shaped not only by
the continuing vitality of indigenous voices, but also by the European dread of
miscenation and racial decline” (TLS)]
Fowler, Alastair (1999). ‘And yet
he’s ours. The literary ambitions and historical enthusisams of RLS’ TLS
13.8.99: 5-6.
[review
article of Barry Menikoff’s edition of Kidnapped; is S a (real) Scottish
writer?].
Ganner, Heidi (1999).
“Intertextuality and Paradigm Shifts in Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly, Emma Tennant’s Two
Women of London. The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde, and Robert
Swindells’ Jacqueline Hyde.” Gudrun Grabher and Sonja Bahn-Coblans (eds)
(1999). The Self at Risk in English
Literatures and Other Landscapes. Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft. Innsbruck: Wolfgang Meid. Pp.
193-202.
[The article focuses on three versions of Stevenson’s
story in which the male protagonist Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde is replaced by a female
central character.
In Martin (1990) the narrative
centre is moved to a minor character, a maid only mentioned in passing in
Stevenson’s text. The story is also expanded by the narration of scenes ‘offstage’
in the original and by ‘adding to Dr Jekyll’s story that of
his maidservant’s childhood and youth as well as her role within the Jekyll
household. She becomes a mirror to Jekyll’s innermost desires… Mary gets drawn
into his double life with a strange mixture of horror and fascination, which in
psycho-analytical terms links up with her childhood experiences as an abused
child with an alcoholic father in a world of poverty’ (195). ‘The author’s interest lies in the woman
rather than in Dr Jekyll, the centre of attention for the maid. It is a
feminist’s curiosity in the reactions of the passive young woman to a socially
superior and attractive master in a situation of economic dependency’ (196).
In Tennant (1989) ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde are transformed into the figures of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde’ and the
setting is transposed to Britain in the Thatcher period. The educated and
spoilt Eliza Jekyll becomes Mrs Hyde, and the latter, through drugs, transforms
to a more desirable self and into the art-gallery manageress Eliza. Tennant
‘makes her protagonist a very human Hyde, a victim herself whose deed is an act
of self-defence… an act of freeing herself from oppressive circumstances and
threats which surround her as they do all women’. Responsibility is shifted ‘to
society at large and to its male members in particular.’ The complex narrative
pattern is ‘a modern equivalent of Stevenson’s technique’ (196, 198), and the multiple
I’s seem to correspond to Jekyll’s speculation about the personality as ‘a mere
polity of… incongruous and independent denizens’ (200).
Swindells (1996) ‘seems to be a
didactic story, a warning against glue-sniffing and drug-taking. At the same
time it is a gripping first-person account of a juvenile psychiatric patient.
Finally, Swindells adds to all this the girl’s literary speculations, which are
actually a mini-introduction to what fiction is all about. What is noteworthy
about [the novel], however, is the fact that the figure of this young girl Hyde
is also a complex creation and pushed beyond the simple moral judgment of good
and bad’ (198).
In ‘male popular culture’ versions
(such as the rock musical) and in traditional film versions, there is a
‘simplistic identification of Good and Evil’ and sometimes almost a celebration
of the powerful and fascinating Hyde. In contrast, the variations of the theme
in the versions studied in this article lead to a blurring of lines between
good and evil, to an interpretation of the dysfunctional human personality in
terms of psychic disorder related to socio-cultural context, and to a view of
the complexity of human identity.]
Gibson, Brian (1999). ‘Island, Highland and “Undecipherable Blackness”: Natural Landscape Imagery in the Novels of Robert Louis Stevenson’. M.A. thesis, University of Toronto.
Ginzburg, Carlo (1999). ‘Tusitala
and His Polish Reader’. Raritan 18iii: 85-102. http://mural.uv.es/agipe/Tusitala.html
[One
of four lectures given at the Italian Academy in New York (Columbia University)
in 1998 and then as the Clark Lectures in Cambridge. The ocean-wide model of
partly-symbolic exchange in ‘The Bottle Imp’ “may have given” Malinowski a way
to see as a whole the details of the Pacific kula exchange - the theory
of which emerged in April 1918 in a period when Malinowski is fascinated by S’s
letters. repr. in Ginzburg 2000]
Goh, Robbie B. H. (1999). ‘Textual Hyde
and Seek: “Gentility”, Narrative Play and Prescription in Stevenson’s Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. Journal of Narrative Theory 29ii: 158-83.
[The focus of the narrative is on the act of
interpretation: the narrative voice is elusive and teasing with an uncertain
moral perspective; Lanyon is associated with “indecent interpretative haste”;
and Jekyll’s narrative is characterized by a lack a single perspective and of
narrative restraint. In its reliance on self-conscious language-games, JH
“closely resembles and anticipates postmodernity”.]
Jolly, Roslyn (1999). ‘Stevenson’s
“Sterling Domestic Fiction”, “The Beach of Falesà”‘. The Review of English
Studies 50 (No. 200): 463-482.
[the marriage between the Wiltshire and Uma initiates a series of
transgressions which call into question the boundaries that separate romance
and realism, adventure and domesticity, masculinity and femininity, white skin
and brown. Abstract: “This article explores the
relations between genre, gender, geography, and race in Robert Louis
Stevenson’s ‘The Beach of Falesá’. It argues that, while the story is a generic
hybrid, its deepest and most consistent affiliations are with the feminine
realm of the domestic novel. Moving away from Gothic modes of imaging colonial
space and from adventure modes of defining masculinity, the story traces its
narrator-protagonist’s embrace of marriage, domesticity, and fatherhood. This
trajectory reverses Stevenson’s much-publicized stance on genre and gender in
the romance-realism debates of the 1880s, disrupts the conventional
polarization of the domestic and the exotic in the Victorians’ fictional
mapping of their world, and challenges Victorian notions of racial as well as
fictional purity - for the story’s moral centre is its protagonist’s commitment
to a mixed-race marriage and family. The marriage between the English Wiltshire
and Polynesian Uma, defying the European taboo on miscegenation, initiates a
series of transgressions which call into question the boundaries that separate
romance and realism, adventure and domesticity, masculinity and femininity,
white skin and brown. The Wiltshires’ mixed-race children hypostasize the
hybrid text ‘The Beach of Falesá’: they are the material foundation for all the
generic and ideological crossings proposed by this ‘sterling domestic
fiction’.”]
McClure, J. Derrick (1999). Language, Poetry and Nationhood:
Scots as a poetic language from 1878 to the present. East Linton (Scotland): The
Tuckwell Press.
[Contains
the chapter “The Curtain Rises: Logie Robertson and Robert Louis Stevenson”]
Massie, Eric (1999). ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’. Studies in Hogg and His World [Stirling University] 10: 73-7.
Mighall, Robert (1999). A Geography
of Victorian Gothic Fiction. Mapping History’s Nightmares. OUP.
[pp.
145-153 ‘The Body as Site of Horror’: Hyde originates in J’s
class-consciousness; ‘the topographic and the somatic mirror and comment on
each other’]
Naugrette, Jean-Pierre (1999). ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: autoportrait au miroir’. Arnaud, Pierre (ed.) (1999). Le Portrait. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne.
Naugrette, Jean-Pierre (1999). ‘Stevenson’, pp. 732-4 in Polet, Jean-Claude (ed.) (1999). Patrimoine Littéraire Européen. 11b Renaissances Nationales et conscience universelle 1832-1885, Romanticismes reflechis. Paris/Bruxelles: De Boek & Larcier.
Norquay, Glenda
R. L. Stevenson on Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1999): this brings together a range of Stevenson's essays on literature, arranged in chronological order, and demonstrates the development and range of his literary influences and thinking about the art of fiction. Each essay is annotated, and there is a substantial introduction locating the essays in context.
Pearson, Nels C. (1999). ‘The Moment of
Modernism: Schopenhauer’s “Unstable Phantom” in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
and Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae’. Studies in Scottish
Literature 33: 182-202.
[The article explores some compelling parallels between
the form/content interplay in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and R.
L. Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae. After examining each novel in
relation to key statements on aesthetics and truth by Immanuel Kant, Arthur
Schopenhauer, T.S. Eliot, and the critical school of Deconstruction, it argues
that Stevenson’s novel, possibly more so than Conrad’s, offers a darkly volatile,
and thus philosophically modern, commentary on the relationship between
narration, subjectivity, and the verifiability of meaningful human experience.]
Pierce, Jason Adam (1999). ‘Penny-Wise and Virtue-Foolish’:
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Late Victorian Publishing Industry’. PhD
dissertation U of South Carolina. (DAI A 2000 Jan, 2507; DAI No. DA9939209)
[How
Stevenson successfully invented new approaches to established popular
genres--travel narratives, short stories, adventure novels, and the ‘shilling
shocker’--and conferred upon them a cross-cultural respectability, in the
process discovering just how dependent an author’s popular and critical success
is upon an accurate understanding of his/her audience. Ch. 1: how Stevenson’s
first book, An Inland Voyage differs from other travel narratives of the
time. The text demonstrates the irony of Stevenson’s desire to appeal to a
popular audience when his writing is implicitly directed towards an elite
readership. Ch. 2: Stevenson’s development as a writer of short stories, paying
particular attention to the tales’ depictions of artist figures and reading
them as manifestations of the author’s maturing understanding of the writing
profession. Ch. 3: Stevenson’s contributions to Young Folks; how Stevenson
altered his approach to the adventure genre, writing first for an adult
audience, then for a juvenile audience, and finally for both. Ch. 4: how Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was transformed from shilling shocker into a cultural
phenomenon. Using excerpts from reviews of the book and the first serious
adaptations, this chapter demonstrates how the text achieved a celebrity of its
own, independent of its author.]
Scott, Patrick (1999). ‘Anatomizing
professionalism: medicine, authorship and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The
Body-Snatcher”‘. Victorian Institute Journal [Univ. N. Carolina] 27:
113-30.
[‘argues that, although most readers and critics have
considered “The Body Snatcher” beneath serious consideration… the tale is “not
simply a retelling” of the events from which it is derived, but rather a
“rereading”. Calling it “a tale for the 1880s, not a tale of the 1820s”, and
discussing a variety of details concerning plot and publication, Scott advances
the thesis that the story in fact embodies a serious indictment of liberal
Victorian culture’., The Year’s Work in English Studies for 1999]
Towheed, Sahfquat (1999). ‘R. L. Stevenson’s
Sense of the Uncanny: “The Face in the Cheval-Glass”‘. English Literature in
Transition 42i: 23-38.
[In ‘Das Unheimliche’ (1919), Freud narrates a personal anecdote of
uncannily finding himself back the same street despite trying to get away.
Writing about the uncanny is itself uncanny because it involves repetitive
returns to the unfamilar/familiar.
In Jekyll and Hyde, Utterson (who ‘had not crossed the
doors’ of a theatre for twenty years) comes across a door that he both knows
and finds strange, so that Enfield’s story about it ‘goes home’. Similarly,
Hyde’s face is familiar to Enfield (‘I can see him this moment’) yet unfamiliar
(‘I can’t describe him’). Utterson then experiences a ‘compulsion to repeat’:
dreaming of Jekyll dreaming, and of another door (to the bedroom) being opened
by a threatening figure. This leads to repeated returns to the back door, the
encounter with Hyde and to his ‘case-study’ explaining Jekyll’s behaviour as
narcissism (‘self-love’), associated with repression of memory and death of the
conscience.
The search now leads to Hyde’s Soho
flat (where ‘behind the door’ Utterson finds – and conceals – a clue to
Jekyll’s – and his own – involvement with Hyde), and to Jekyll’s house. Here,
Utterson finally crosses ‘the theatre’ ‘with a distasteful sense of
strangeness’ and passes through a red door to Jekyll’s raised cabinet. ‘The
Incident at the Window’ returns to the beginning of the story and the door
again, a repetition that reveals the familiar nature of the repressed: the
glimpse of Jekyll’s transformation produces ‘an answering horror’ in both.
Narratives of the uncanny are
narratives of the self, even Freud’s essay is partly autobiographical, hence
lack a rational explanation of phenomena. The defining structure of Jekyll
and Hyde (door behind door, enclosure within enclosure) has (like Freud’s
essay) a lacuna at its centre, something that cannot be explained. The last two
chapters, documents found at the end of the search, contain notable gaps:
Lanyon cannot ‘set on paper’ what he has witnessed, and Jekyll’s statement (far
from ‘full’), leaves motivation, crimes, and exact relationship of Jekyll
and Hyde unexplored.
Jekyll and Hyde is a
self-analysis that at the same time tries to hide the author. In the mirror,
Poole and Utterson expect to find a revelation (approaching it ‘with
unvolountary horror’), yet the mirror is apparently narcissisitic too (‘This
glass have seen some strange things... And none stranger than itself’), and,
assuming the same of the text, the reflection we expect to see in it is that of
the author himself.
Stevenson had a compulsive desire
to return to narratives of the uncanny (e.g. ‘Markheim’ with its many mirrors
and double of the protagonist), and to incorporate in them his own uncanny
experiences, as he explains in the self-analytical ‘Chapter on Dreams’. Here
too – as in the last chapter of Jekyll and Hyde – there is a
third-person case-study that dissolves into a first-person admission, and the
description of a dream-persona who has a day-existence in the surgical theatre
(like Jekyll), and who indulges in compulsive behaviour (stair climbing) (like
Utterson), and nocturnal wandering (like Hyde).
Though ‘a portrait of the artist
as a narcissist’, ‘Dreams’ is also ambivalent since (like Jekyll and Hyde)
it reveals very little. The central paradox (like that of the cheval-glass) is
that the dreamer produces the reflected work of art virtually excluding the
artist himself. This essay too contains lacunae that refuse to be filled: ‘in
the mirrors of Stevenson’s narratives of the uncanny, it is the artist who
forever refuses to show his face.’ ]
Tulloch, Graham (ed.) (1999). The
Beach of Falesa in Context: a Collection of Essays. Adelaide: English
Department, Flinders University, 1999). ISBN 0-7258-0852-7, pp. 76.
[Copies
available from the English Department, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100,
Adelaide, Australia 5001 for $6.95 Australian dollars; collection of student essays
(without introduction)]
Waterston, Elizabeth (1999). ‘Going
for Eternity: A Child’s Garden of Verses’. Canadian Children’s Literature
96:25 (4): 5-10
[Explores
the history of composition and the themes and poetic techniques of the Garden
verses, and comments on their influence on Canadian poets such as Dennis
Lee]
1998
Beattie, Hilary J. (1998). ‘A Fairbairnian
Analysis of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde’ in Neil J. Skolnick and David E. Scharff (eds.) (1998). Fairbairn,
Then and Now. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press (Relational Perspectives
Book Series, 10).
[Hilary Beattie writes: ‘This paper was originally presented
at a conference (in NYC, 1996) devoted to the work of the Scottish
psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn (1889-1964), one of the seminal figures of the
British Object Relations school of psychoanalysis. There are remarkable
parallels between the early lives of Stevenson and of Fairbairn, both raised as
only children in strictly Presbyterian Edinburgh homes, and both aware from
very early on of the conflict between social respectability and hidden passion.
Given their shared, Scottish cultural heritage, it is significant that
Fairbairn’s theory of split ego-structures and the repressed (parental) objects
with which they interact gives us one powerful key to the structure of this
most famous of double stories, in particular to the possible meanings of the multiple
characters in their relationships to each other. His theory also affords
insight into the uncanny, menacing nature of the tale, by pointing to what
remains repressed, although alluded to, even after the horrific denouement.
‘I explore some of these themes
further in a forthcoming paper, ‘The repression and the return of bad objects:
W.R.D. Fairbairn and the historical roots of theory’, to appear in The
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, probably Oct-Nov, 2003.’]
Brantlinger, Patrick (1998). The
Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British
Fiction. Indiana University Press. ISBN (cloth) 0-253-33454-3, $39.95, ISBN
(paperback) 0-253-21249-9, $19.95.
[alarm
at mass literacy; Ch. 8. ‘The Educations of Edward Hyde and Edwin Reardon’
explores the conflict between respectable and mass or low culture in Jekyll
and Hyde and in new Grub Street]
Burke, Tony (1998). Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde. London: Longman (York Notes).
Calanchi, Alessandra (1998). ‘“Others will follow”: lo strano caso di Jekyll, Hyde e Sherlock Holmes’. Rivista di Studi Vittoriani [Pescara, Italy] 3v: 133-143 [versions and rewritings of JH]
Colley, Ann C. (1998). Nostalgia
and Recollection in Victorian Culture. London/New York: Macmillan/St.
Martin’s Press. ISBN
(England) 0-333-72813-0, ISBN (USA) 0-312-21664-5, $60.00.
Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture considers representations of longing and memory in significant Victorian writings and paintings. The book is divided into three sections; “Voyages and Exile”; “Childhood Spaces”; and “The Idea of Recollection.” Robert Louis Stevenson is prominent in the discussion. There are three chapters devoted to his experience of nostalgia and of recollection: “R. L. Stevenson’s Nationalism and the Dualities of Exile”; “Rooms without Mirrors: The Childhood Interiors of Ruskin, Pater, and Stevenson”; and “R. L. Stevenson and the Idea of Recollection.”
Currie, Mark (1998). ‘True Lies. Unreliable Identities in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. In Postmodern Narrative Theory. Basingstoke/New York: Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press.
[‘The chapter on Stevenson [is] a witty, extended reflection of the unreliability of self-narration… Currie adds that his argument here is "borrowed heavily" from a lecture previously given on another text entirely, Confessions of a Justified Sinner’ (Terry Caesar in Style (Fall, 2001)).]
Downing, Ben (1998). ‘An Old Gypsy Nature’ [review of Mehew E. (ed.) (1997). Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson ]. New Criterion16x: ***. As well as discussing the letters, Downing comments on Stevenson’s ‘double reputation: as clever yet flyweight raconteur to kids and middlebrows, a downmarket Conrad, and as writer’s writer; among those taking the latter view have been (besides James et al.) Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Borges, and Graham Greene’; his strength is as an ‘observer of moral conflict, dilemma, and ambiguity.’]
Epstein, Hugh (1998). ‘Victory’s
Marionettes: Conrad’s Revisitation of Stevenson’. 189-216 in Carabine, Keith
& Knowles, Owen (eds.). Conrad, James and Other Relations. Lublin,
Poland : Maria Curie-Sklodowska University.
[‘The essay seeks to
characterise Conrad’s view of Stevenson and, more particularly, examines the
creative use Conrad made of The Ebb Tide in constructing Victory (1915).
It shows the ways in which the configuration of three variously fallen
desperadoes confronting a gentleman on his lonely island belong to both
Stevenson’s novella and Conrad’s novel. A trio becomes a quartet. Conrad
invades a territory of colonial misadventure that Stevenson had made thoroughly
his own and subjects Stevenson’s brilliantly observed creations to a Dickensian
grotesque re-fashioning for his own rather more symbolic ends. What Conrad
loves in The Ebb Tide (though he nowhere acknowledges it) is the brutal
comedy of misapprehension that Stevenson creates and that he can re-work into
his own marionette show. Conrad creates a very different sort of work of art,
but The Ebb Tide is vital to its genesis.’]
Hogle, Gerald E.(1998). ‘Stevenson, Robert
Louis (1850-94)’. Mulvey-Roberts, Marie (1998). The Handbook to Gothic
Literature. New York: New York University Press. Pp. 220-223.
[Notes that there is ‘a clear Gothic period’ in
Stevenson’s writing career. From the early to the middle 1880s, he wrote
‘Thrawn Jane,’ ‘The Body-Snatchers,’ ‘Markheim,’ and ‘Olalla,’ capped in the
autumn of 1885 with the writing of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde. ‘These pieces reveal the ways he focused the Gothic form on the
modern self torn between psychological and social forces.’]
Kemp, Martin (1998). ‘Hyde’s horrors’. Nature Vol. 393 Issue 6682 (5/21/98): 219.
[Defining types through facial and cranial formations in 19th century science: JH, Paul Broca, Darwin, films.]
Mulvey-Roberts, Marie (1998). The
Handbook to Gothic Literature. London: Macmillan.
[‘Scottish
Gothic’ (208-10) by Douglas A. Mack; ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’ (220-3) by Jerold
E. Hogle]
Naugrette, Jean-Pierre (1988). ‘Robert
Louis Stevenson lecteur de Sir Walter Scott: le cas de Waverley’. Pp. 37-49 in Suhamy, Pierre (dir.). Waverley.
Sir Walter Scott. Paris: ellipses (CAPES/Agrégation Anglais).
[S’s
references and debts to Scott; S’s ‘dialogue’ with Scott despite his denials; S
less close to Scott and Lukàcs than he is to Barthes and Le plaisir du texte;
S’s refusal to integrate History in the plot of a novel distinguishes him from
Scott; he turns from Middle Ages and ballads towards a romance of action and
movement reminiscent of Buchan and Hitchcock]
Phelan, James E. (1998). ‘Freudian Commentary on the Parallels of the Male Homosexual Analysand to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 19iii-iv: 215-22.
Pierce, Jason A. (1998). ‘The Belle Lettrist and the People’s Publisher: Or, the context of Treasure Island’s first-form publication’. Victorian Periodicals Review 31iv: 356-68
Pozzi Lolli, M. Luisa & Margherita Giacobazzi (1998). “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, guida alla lettura. Torino: Loescher.
Rodriguez
Monroy, Amalia (1998). La
huelga de la cultura: Cuatro ensayos sobre etica y literatura. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
[A
Lacanian study of the modern dominance of the discourse of science over other
forms of discourse, though a commentary on four master texts of Romanticism and
Gothic which are aware of this ethical dilemma (Shelley’s Frankenstein,
Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Poe’s Tales and Stevenson’s Jekyll
and Hyde). In these texts the obliteration of subjectivity by science
produces a monstrosity that is bound to return (like all that is repressed). In
contrast, the human subject can be seen as a subject of desire, which accounts
for all the universe of emotions that science leaves out. Ch. 5: ‘Atravesando
el umbral: Dr. Jekyll y el saber o del deseo y su causa’ (‘Crossing the
threshold: Dr Jekyll and knowledge; or: desire and its cause’)]
Scholar, Richard (1998).
‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: A Case-Study in Translation?’. Translation
and Literature [Scotland] 7i: 42-55
[The
‘Case’ of the title is generally interpreted as a (proto-Freudian)
‘case-study’, however the plot
is that of a detective case (so in French ‘case’ should be translated as
affaire: case-histories have a different narrative structure.]
Scholdstrom, U. [‘Why is Doctor
Jekyll a physician? ...and how closely related is he to Frankenstein?’]. Lakartidningen
95x (4 March 1998):1028-1030
[in Swedish]
Smith, Vanessa (1998). Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters. Cambridge: CUP. 0-521-57359-9. $59.95 (hardback). [examines a range of nineteenth-century European accounts from the Pacific that depict Polynesian responses to imported metropolitan culture, in particular its technologies of writing and print and how they were appropriated and interrogated by Pacific peoples. VS argues that the texts of contact and settlement are shaped at least as much by local contexts as by the agendas of their European authors. Ch. 3: Stevenson’s Pacific travels; Ch. 4: Stevenson’s Pacific fictions; Ch. 5: Stevenson’s Pacific History. Smith makes an interesting case for Stevenson as a figure embodying Victorian ideas of ‘romantic authorship,’ and shows how RLS occupies a space between metropolitan and colonial cultures.
Spehner, Norbert (1998). Jekyll &
Hyde: opus 600. Roberval:
Ashem Fictions (1335 Rang 1, Roberval (Québec), G8H 2M9 Canada). $6 (US/Can),
elsewhere $8/32FF.
[‘une chrono-bilbliographie
de 600 éditions internationales de The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
publiés entre 1886 et 1997’. 68 pp booklet, with a preface, main bibliography of
editions and a selective bibliography of secondary studies. NS has also
published companion studies of Frankenstein and Dracula and
publishes the journal Marginalia. Bulletin d’information sur les
études paralittéraires.]
Theroux, Paul (1998). ‘The ten essential travel books’. Forbes (Spring): 166-7.
Wood, Naomi J. (1998). ‘Gold Standards and Silver Subversions: Treasure Island and the Romance of Money’. Children’s Literature 26: 61-85.
Archive: studies 1990-93 | studies 1994-97