Essays on R.L.S.

This collection of essays based on papers presented at the Stevenson conference at Gargnano in 2002 effectively maps the current state of international criticism of the Scottish author. Despite the four-year lag between their first presentation and their publication—an interval during which at least two of the essays have appeared as chapters in Stevenson monographs—the thirty short studies in this collection clearly show how people are reading and thinking about Stevenson today.

The critical reevaluation of Stevenson in the 1990s had two major conceptual centres. It was under the banners of modernism and postcolonialism that Stevenson was rescued from belle-lettrist oblivion and instated as a subject of serious academic study. In 1996 Alan Sandison's Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism made the case for the (proto)modernist qualities of Stevenson's fiction, while around the same time a number of postcolonial critics turned their attention to the Pacific writings, demolishing the received and unexamined image of Stevenson as a bearer of imperialist ideology. These centres of critical interest remain strong, as Writer of Boundaries shows. The analysis of Stevenson's modernism has now expanded to an exploration of his affinities with postmodernism. The reference points for this project are largely European, or at least non-Anglo-Saxon, and today's critics pair Stevenson's name as readily with Baudelaire, Musil, Barthes, Deleuze or Borges as the Victorians paired it with Haggard or Kipling. The unpicking or reconfiguring of those imperialist connections also continues. Recognition of Stevenson's critical exploration of colonialist and racist thinking is a feature of many essays collected here. Among them, Manfred Malzahn's excellent commentary on the narrative methods of "The Beach of Falesá" stands out as a particularly sensitive engagement with the complexities of Stevenson's inside/outside relation to the British Empire.

If modernism and postcolonialism set the course of Stevenson criticism in the 1990s, since the turn of the century two new centres of critical attention have emerged. Anthropology and psychoanalysis—the latter particularly in its relation to literary theory—now dominate Stevenson studies. In one way or another, anthropological or psychoanalytic ideas inflect the majority of essays in Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer of Boundaries. Importantly, neither conceptual framework has been imposed on Stevenson's work from the outside; both emerge from Stevenson's own avowed intellectual interests.

Placing Stevenson's literary essays in the intellectual context of nineteenth-century evolutionary psychology, Julia Reid shows how Stevenson's theory of fiction responded to the different strands of evolutionary thought he encountered in the work of Charles Darwin, E. B. Tylor and Herbert Spencer. Stevenson's interest in the part played by unconscious forces in the creation and reception of art found an organising framework in the Victorian anthropological concept of "savage survivals," among which he numbered what he called "ancestral memories." Literary romance, he believed, could draw upon the liberating, revitalising and potentially subversive force of these unconscious, inherited racial or genetic memories, which were also evident in dreams, oral narratives and children's play. Reid's historicist approach to Stevenson's anthropological thinking pays valuable dividends, especially when contrasted with what we might call the "hearsay" approach, which for so long ensured the reproduction of inaccurate views of Stevenson. That approach is typified by an episode from Orwell's Burmese Days, cited by the editors of this volume in their introduction, in which an enthusiast of empire quotes a phrase "that probably came from Stevenson … 'torchbearers upon the path of progress.'" Anybody who has read A Footnote to History, or Stevenson's letters to the Times from Samoa, knows that there is no phrase he would have been less likely to use, unless ironically as part of an attack on European colonialism. Reid's analysis of what Stevenson actually, rather than "probably," said about evolutionary psychology confirms that he was always a dissenter from meliorist anthropological narratives, always interested in the productive power of the "savage" beneath the...