Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T23:15:58.275Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

ROMANCES OF UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT: SPATIALITY, TRADE, AND FORM IN ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON’S PACIFIC NOVELS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2015

Philip Steer
Philip Steer*
Affiliation:
Massey University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the late 1880s, around the time he decided to settle on the Samoan island of Upolu, Robert Louis Stevenson's writing began to take a strikingly different shape as he attempted to infuse it with the flavor of his new surroundings. “When Stevenson traveled to the margins of the empire,” John Kucich observes, “he suddenly found new ways of organizing his narratives” (59). His novel-length Pacific works The Wrecker (1892) and The Ebb-Tide(1894), both nominally co-authored with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, made a marked departure from the dominant models for representing imperial space and themes provided by his own Treasure Island (1883) and by H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885), and they were generally met by critics with bemusement and disappointment. One reviewer of The Ebb-Tide began by observing, “It certainly has no claim to a place with those romances which are already ranked among the classics of our tongue,” and concluded sorrowfully: “This is not the Stevenson we love, but it is something to be read and remembered, nevertheless” (qtd. in Maixner 458, 59). While recent critical interest in Stevenson's Pacific fiction has tended to focus on works such as “The Beach of Falesá” (1892) and the portrayal of cultural encounter, The Wrecker in particular continues to be held in low regard. As Stephen Arata summarizes,

[M]ost critics have dismissed it as overly diffuse, shapeless, and more than a little self-indulgent – the closest thing to a loose baggy monster that Stevenson ever produced. Frank McLynn's assessment is representative: while The Wrecker, he says, is “in some ways the oddest and most intriguing” of Stevenson's novels, it is finally a failure because it lacks a “proper story structure” and because “there are far too many diversions and irrelevancies that clog the action.” (par. 7)

Yet the fact that The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide are not only Stevenson's two longest Pacific-themed works of fiction, but are also marked by similar structural elements and thematic preoccupations, suggests the value of reconsidering their centrality to his engagement with the increasing western domination of the region in the last decades of the century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 43 , Issue 2: EDITORS' TOPIC: The Nineteenth-Century Pacific Rim , June 2015 , pp. 343 - 356
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Arata, Stephen. “Stevenson's Careful Observances.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 47 (2007): n. pag. Web. 13 Feb. 2013.Google Scholar
Booth, Bradford Allen, and Mehew, Ernest, eds. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. 8 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994–95.Google Scholar
Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Çelikkol, Ayşe. Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chandler, James K.England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.Google Scholar
Colley, Ann C. “Robert Louis Stevenson's South Seas Crossings.” SEL 48.4 (2008): 871–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conrad, Joseph. An Outcast of the Islands. Edinburgh: Grant, 1925.Google Scholar
Daly, Nicholas. Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Dryden, Linda. Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edmond, Rod. Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Esty, Jed. “The Colonial Bildungsroman: The Story of an African Farm and the Ghost of Goethe.” Victorian Studies 49.3 (2007): 407–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fowler, Alastair. “Parables of Adventure: The Debatable Novels of Robert Louis Stevenson.” Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction: Critical Essays. Ed. Campbell, Ian. Manchester: Carcanet, 1979. 105–29.Google Scholar
Green, Martin. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. New York: Basic, 1979.Google Scholar
Harvey, David. “The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation: A Reconstruction of the Marxian Theory.” Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. 1975. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2001. 237–66.Google Scholar
Ho, Janice. “The Spatial Imagination and Literary Form of Conrad's Colonial Fictions.” Journal of Modern Literature 30.4 (2007): 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Empire, 1875–1914. New York: Vintage, 1989.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Jolly, Roslyn. “Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Maine, and the Anthropology of Comparative Law.” Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 556–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, Paul M. “Germany and the Samoan Tridominium, 1889–98: A Study in Frustrated Imperialism.” Germany in the Pacific and Far East, 1870–1914. Ed. Kennedy, Paul M. and Moses, John A.. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1977. 89–114.Google Scholar
Kucich, John. Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Lang, Andrew. “Realism and Romance.” 1886. The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c.1880–1900. Ed. Ledger, Sally and Luckhurst, Roger. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 99–104.Google Scholar
Levine, Caroline. “Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies.” Victorian Studies 48.4 (2006): 625–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lineham, Katherine Bailey. “Taking Up With Kanakas: Stevenson's Complex Social Criticism in ‘The Beach of Falesá’.” ELT 33.4 (1990): 407–22.Google Scholar
Maixner, Paul, ed. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1981.Google Scholar
Makdisi, Saree. “Colonial Space and the Colonization of Time in Scott's Waverley.” Studies in Romanticism 34.2 (1995): 155–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. New York: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
McLynn, Frank. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. London: Hutchinson, 1993.Google Scholar
Meek, Ronald L.Social Science and the Ignoble Savage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900. London: Verso, 1998.Google Scholar
Newbury, Colin. “Mammon in Paradise: Economic Enterprise in Pacific Historiography.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26.2 (1998): 196–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patteson, Richard F. “King Solomon's Mines: Imperialism and Narrative Structure.” Journal of Narrative Technique 8.2 (1978): 112–23.Google Scholar
Quint, David. “Epic and Empire.” Comparative Literature 41.1 (1989): 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, Walter. Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Hence. 1814. Ed. Lamont, Claire. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Smith, Neil. “The Geography of Uneven Development.” 100 Years of Permanent Revolution: Results and Prospects. Ed. Dunn, Bill and Radice, H. K.. London: Pluto, 2006. 180–95.Google Scholar
Stein, Peter. “Law and Society in Eighteenth-Century Thought.” Scotland in the Age of Improvement: Essays in Scottish History in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Mitchison, Rosalind and Phillipson, N. T.. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1970. 148–65.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Robert Louis. A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa. London: Cassell, 1892.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Robert Louis. In the South Seas: Being an Account of Experiences and Observations in the Marquesas, Paumotus and Gilbert Islands in the Course of Two Cruises, on the Yacht “Casco” (1888) and the Schooner “Equator” (1889). Edinburgh: Longmans, 1896.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Robert Louis, and Osbourne, Lloyd. The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette. 1893. South Sea Tales. Ed. Roslyn Jolly. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Wrecker. 1892. London: Cassell, 1911.Google Scholar
Watson, Roderick. “‘The unrest and movement of our century’: The Universe of The Wrecker.” Journal of Stevenson Studies 4 (2007): 114–28. Web. 13 Feb. 2013.Google Scholar