Cruising With Robert Louis Stevenson

by Buckton, Oliver S.

• ISBN13: 9780821417560
• ISBN10: 0821417568
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-06-14
• Publisher: Ohio Univ Pr

Summary

Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Bodyis the first book-length study about the influence of travel on Robert Louis Stevensonrs"s writings, both fiction and nonfiction. Within the contexts of late-Victorian imperialism and ethnographic discourse, the book offers original close readings of individual works by Stevenson while bringing new theoretical insights to bear on the relationship between travel, authorship, and gender identity. Oliver S. Buckton develops "cruising" as a critical term, linking Stevensonrs"s leisurely mode of travel with the striking narrative motifs of disruption and fragmentation that characterize his writings. Buckton follows Stevensonrs"s career from his early travel books to show how Stevensonrs"s major works of fiction, such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Ebb-Tide, derive from the innovative techniques and materials Stevenson acquired on his global travels. Exploring Stevensonrs"s pivotal role in the revival of "romance" in the late nineteenth century,Cruising with Robert Louis Stevensonhighlights Stevensonrs"s treatment of the human body as part of his resistance to realism, arguing that the energies and desires released by travel are often routed through resistant or comic corporeal figures. Buckton also focuses on Stevensonrs"s writing about the South Seas, arguing that his groundbreaking critiques of European colonialism are formed in awareness of the fragility and desirability of Polynesian bodies and landscapes. Cruising with Robert Louis Stevensonwill be indispensable to all admirers of Stevenson as well as of great interest to readers of travel writing, Victorian ethnography, gender studies, and literary criticism.

Author Biography

Oliver S. Buckton is an associate professor of English at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, where he teaches Victorian literature, critical theory, and film. He is the author of Secret Selves: Confession and Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography and has published essays on Dickens, Stevenson, Wilde, and Schreiner.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Travel and the (Re)animated Body
Reanimating Stevenson's Corpus	p. 35
The Beast in the Mountains: Misusing the Ass in Travels with a Donkey	p. 67
Mapping the Historical Romance
"Faithful to his map": Profit, Desire, and the Ends of Travel in Treasure Island	p. 97
"Mr. Betwixt-and-Between": History, Travel, and Narrative Indeterminacy in Kidnapped	p. 126
Travel and Ethnography in the South Seas
"A quarry of materials": The Fictional History of Stevenson's South Seas Cruises	p. 151
"Buridan's donkey": The (Para)texts of Samoan Colonial History in David Balfour and A Footnote to History	p. 181
Rewriting the Imperial Romance
"The White Man's Quarrel": Sexuality, Travel, and Colonialism in Stevenson's South Sea Tales	p. 215
"There's an end to it": Disease and Partnership in The Ebb-Tide	p. 245
Notes	p. 271
Bibliography	p. 329
Index	p. 339
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