Robert Louis Stevenson Studies 1991-2000
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.
[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.
[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):
[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.]
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:
[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).
[“introduction to the ... playful philosophy of the prince of storytellers”]
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.
["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 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.
[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. and 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.
[The paternalism and racial superiority inscribed by the British Robert Louis Stevenson and the American Jack London to exonerate imperial ventures is undermined by configurations of colonialism as parasitical and a carrier of pestilence. Contagion and disease in the South Seas is not only metaphorical but are also the material consequences of colonial expansionism.]
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].
Seivert, Debra J. (2000). “Resounding Voices: Willa Cather’s Literary Braiding of Robert Louis
Stevenson, James M. Barrie, and Edgar Allan Poe”. PhD dissertation, University
[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.
[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 Gold’ and ‘Twenty-Pounders’: Robert Louis Stevenson’s textualized economies”. Criticism
[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”; Stephen McKenna, “Tusitala” (speech at RLS Club dinner, 1924); “A Birthday Gift”(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?” (background to the RLS 2000 Conference); “Pleasantly Recalled is R. L. Stevenson’s Stay” (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” (research on RLS’s stay at Brielle/ Manasquan in 1888); Jim Winegar, “RLS in Samoa in the Year 2000”, (from the President of the Vailima RLS Museum); Karen Steele, “Food and Drink” (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”]
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
[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).]
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]
Di Piazza, Elio (1999). L’avventura bianca: testo e colonialismo nell’Inghilterra del secondo Ottocento
[White adventure: text and colonialism in the second half of the nineteenth century], Bari: Adriatica, 1999.
[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.]
Di Piazza, Elio (1999). “Tragitti etici e utilitaristici della nozione di valore” [Ethical and utilitarian paths in the
concept of value]. D. Corona (a cura di) (1999). Autobiografie e contesti
culturali: ibridazione, generi e alterità. Palermo: Facoltà di Lettere.
[Analyzes the passage from use to exchange value in the notion of treasure, comparing Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale with Treasure Island.]
Edmond, Rod (1999). Representing the South Pacific. Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin. 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 enthusiasms of RLS” TLS
[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.
[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)
[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.
[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:
[“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.
[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]
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.
[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:
[versions and rewritings of JH]
Colley, Ann C. (1998). Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture. London/New York: Macmillan/St.
[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.
[IN the last chapter 'the gap between Jekyll and Hyde is reducing at the same speed as the gap between narrated time and the moment of narration' (p. 123); neither time of narration and narrated time, not Jekyll and Hyde can exist at the same time; 'the implied narrative beyond the end of the final sentence, that is the great mystery of the story' (p. 124). Writng is at the centre of Jekyll's house, but it is not the ultimate revelation but the ultimate disguise. "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 Criterion 16x: ***.
[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
[Defining types through facial and cranial formations in 19th century science: JH, Paul Broca, Darwin, films.]
Mirizzi, Francesca.(1998). “Problems in Literary Theory: Robert Louis Stevenson, between Reality and Imagination”. Cuadernos de Literatura Inglesa y Norteamericana [Pontifica Universidad Catolica Argentina] 3 (1998): 39-50.
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
Smith, Vanessa (1998). Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters. Cambridge:
[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:
[“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.
1997Ambrosini, Richard (1997). “L’antropologia come doppio della “fiction”: Stevenson nel Pacifico”. Lo stato delle cose 1 [marzo-aprile]: 42-54.
Aquien, Pascal (1997). “L’étrange cas du Dr Jekyll et de M. Gray”. in Naugrette (ed.)
(1997), pp. 59-82.
[After mentioning the many affinities beween JH and Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Aquien focusses on the "monster”, from three points-of-view: (i) social (the monster as indicator of what society hides under a mask of respectability), (ii) psychoanalytic (the monster as an image of what the individual hides within himself), (iii) metafictional (the monster as metaphor of the text: the doubling and sliding of meaning in Wide’s paradoxes, the opaque and strange language of Stevenson, and the fact that both texts end with the death of the monster). (RD)]
Borinskikh L.I. (1997). “Philosophical and historical aspects of plot development in Treasure Island by R.L.Stevenson”. In *** (ed.) Traditions and interrelations in Foreign Literature in the 19-20th Centuries. Perm: Perm State Univ. [In Russian].
Bordat, Francis (1997). “Hollywood au travail”. In Jean-Pierre Naugrette (ed.).
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Paris: Autrement (Figures mythiques). 119-147
[An interesting study of Hollywood versions of JH: "Justifications” (how Hollywood screenplays justify Jekyll’s actions); "Incarnations” (comparison of interpretations of Hyde); “Reflets” (links between the films and their cultural context); “Développements” (female characters added to the story); “Exhibitions” (what the films show: sexual pleasures, violence, sadism and the metamorphosis); “Variation” (handsome Hydes, female Hydes, erotic and pornographic versions, parodies, Mary Reilly); "Subtilités” (examples of the instability of meaning associated with the fantastic in the cinema: the ironic classical staue in Mamoulian; the momentary lapses into the other character in The Nutty Professor; the complex Hyde in Frears’ version; the mythical density of characters in the 1941 version).
Mary Reilly is the first version to have some of the rhythm and suspense of the original and also include elements that are often removed (the trampling of the little girl; the transportation of the mirror to the cabinet). Stuart Craig’s magnificent set reproduces Jekyll’s house and allows the Hyde to pass through it to his bedroom after the first transformation, it includes the dissecting theatre and the extraordinary suspended metal gangway with its great symbolic force.
Fleming’s 1941 film makes an important contribution to the myth in its opposed female characters and adds subtle touches: for example, in the way that Jekyll, in a sequence of increased mutual attraction, momentarily looks at Ivy (when she comes to him to look for help) with unblinking eyes (associated with Tracy’s interpretation of Hyde) and, leaving, Bergman says “For a moment I thought…” Bordat refuses to talk in terms of “betrayal” of a text by the cinema: a myth is only constituted in its interpretation, revivifying its contradictions in an infinite search for an impossible resolution.]
Brown, Neil Macara (1996/7). “RLS, Frail Warrior”. Scottish Book Collector 5.vii
[S’s Vailima library]
Brown, Neil Macara (1997). “The French Collection”. Scottish Book Collector
5.ix (1997): 22-5.
[S’s Vailima library]
Calanchi, Alessandra (1997). “‘Lurking about his victim’s room’: il laboratorio del dottor Jekyll”.
In Alessandra Calanchi (1997). Quattro studi in rosso. I confini del privato
maschile nella narrativa vittoriana. Cesena: Società Editrice Il Ponte
[JH reflects Victorian anxieties of degeneration and of the divided self; doubleness and division is obsessively repeated in the language and narrative structures, including Jekyll’s house; architectural features (door, window) and objects (mirror, safe) occur repeatedly; changes occur in marks of identity like handwriting and voice; letters and other documents proliferate. Many references and footnotes.]
Colley, Ann C. (1997). “Robert Louis Stevenson and the Idea of Recollection”. Victorian Literature
and Culture 25ii: 203-224.
[Stevenson’s thought about recollection (both conscious act and unbidden memory) is often expressed in optical metaphors (the magic lantern, the kaleidoscope, and the thaumatrope). These present recollected images as focused and available, in contrast to the fleeting memories of Walter Benjamin’s and his sense of the disappearing past. Perhaps, then, the conditions of empire encourage a memory less subject to fluctuations and offer a more stable nostalgia.]
Colley, Anne C. (1997). “Writing Towards Home: the Landscape of A Child’s Garden of Verses”. Victorian
Poetry 35iii: 303-18.
[Stevenson’s nostalgia for childhood - which he tried to regain through play and writing - is for flexibility of consciousness and for the vicarious violence of play. His adolescent protagonists (Jim, David) move back and forward between childhood and adulthood; the CGV poems show the child’s fluid spatial and temporal orientation. Children themselves are free from the duality and self-consciousness of nostalgia since they do not see the difference of near and far, then and now. Adult sensitivity for difference also makes play difficult (a bed is not a boat): both past and play-world remain unattainable. The play of writing was one way to escape form self-conscious dualism - the narrative has a continuous present and its events and speeches allow an acted-out play. “The writer becomes Jim Hawkins… Writing is the only way home”. Even the alienated Hyde unable to return to Jekyll can still write in Jekyll’s hand.]
Davidson, Guy (1997). “‘Ancient Appetites’: Romance and Desire in Robert Louis
Stevenson”. Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 3 (1997).
[The article examines Stevenson’s theory of literary romance in relation to late nineteenth century commodity culture. It focuses on Stevenson’s early pro-romance polemic, “A Gossip on Romance”, and the text with which he “revived romance”, Treasure Island, arguing that these texts, simultaneously and collaterally with their expression of a poetics of textual immediacy and parsimony, articulate resistances to Britain’s expanding mass society.]
Dibble, Lewis Acker (1997). “Symmetry and Memory, from Proust to Stevenson”. Indiana Univ. Diss. (DAI A 1997, Sept. 58: 3, 857; DAI No.: 9727924)
Edmond, Rod (1997). Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cooke to Gaugin. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
[Ch. 6 “Taking up with Kanakas: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific”, pp. 160-193. How Stevenson came to demystify popular colonial literary forms, particularly the imperial adventure story and the cross-cultural romance in “Falesà”. Racism is problematized by placing it in the first-person narrative. Stevenson displays his fascination with the intersection of the Polynesian and the European]
Hammond, J.R. (1997), A Robert Louis Stevenson Chronology. New York/London: St. Martin’s
[a useful chronological listing, noting composition, publications and significant reading, as well as short biographical notes; at £35 for 101pp., pricey; Mehew has said that it contains errors]
Hirsh, Gordon (1997). “Robert Louis Stevenson”. Brothers, Barbara and Gergits, Julia (eds.). British Travel Writers, 1876-1909 (Vol. 174 of Dictionary of Literary Biography). Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman/Gale Research.
Hollander, John (1997). The Work of Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press. Ch. 8
is dedicated to A Child’s Garden of Verses.
[Hollander places CGV in the poetic tradition and sees echoes of Herrick, Lovelace, Marvell, Cowper, Coleridge (reveries in front of the fire) and Whitman, but also anticipations of Hardy, De La Mare and Wallace Stevens.]
Hubbard, Tom (1997). “North and South in the Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson”. The Anachronist: a
collection of papers. Budapest: Dept. of English Studies, Eötvös Lorán
[S’s early view of the South as the home of the complete artist, as an escape from ill-health and Calvinism; his later darker view of elements of the South ("Olalla”, South Sea tales) and nostalgic return to Scottish narratives and emphasis on the importance of inherited characteristics ]
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques (1997), “Tissage et métissage,” in Naugrette (ed.) (1997), pp.
[Hyde can be seen (in “a Beckettan reading”) as a philosophical demonstration that the individual’s sense of identity is a mere construction. Jekyll and Hyde are like two stages in the “identity” of a single person. The scene of Jekyll waking to see the hand of Hyde is like the thought-experiment of what would happen if we exchange the brains of two different people. Where Hume saw personal identity as an illusion, Locke took it to be based on the persistence of memory, and the memory of both forms of the protagonist persists in the other (what shows the fragility of identity is not the doubling but the repeated back-and-forward transformations).
Hyde is also the symbol of dissolution of the socially-constructed identity: he is the outcast, the symbol of everything that threatens the social order. What frightens Utterson (defender of “propriety” and “property”) is that Hyde has Jekyll’s cheque and that he will inherit Jekyll’s fortune. Hyde is also the "real” that threatens Lacan’s “reality” (the socially-constructed identity that establishes the right of possession).
But Hyde is also “part of the fiction needed for the construction of the Ego”. The Ego of personal identity is woven from real and fictive experiences, past and potential, and requires at least two states of identity. The weaving of the Ego can also be seen as a mise-en-abyme of the text itself, woven from an interaction of writer and reader. Weaving (tissage) is inevitably accompanied by cross-breeding (métissage), the unstable mixture that however produces something new.]
Linehan, Katherine B. (1997). “Revaluing Women and Marriage in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Short Fiction”. English Literature in Transition 40i: 34-59.
Manlove, Colin N. (1997). “‘Closer Than an Eye’: The Interconnectedness of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. In
Sullivan, C. W., III (ed.) (1997). The Dark Fantastic. Selected Essays from the Ninth International Conference
on the Fantastic in the Arts. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press (Science
Fiction and Fantasy, Contributions to the Study of, No. 71)
[possibly similar to Ch. 6 in Manlove 1994]
Mari, Michele (1997). Tu, sanguinosa infanzia.
[“La freccia nera”: a fictional(ized) autobiographical fragment in which the young Mari reads Stevenson’s The Black Arrow and then receives the same book as a present from his father; he despairs of pretending to be reading and enjoying the latter, until he realizes that they are different translations. There follows a phrase-by-phrase comparison of the first sentence, presented as the gradual discovery by the young reader of marvellous difference. The same volume contains “Otto scrittori”: a fictionalized search to find the most authentic narrator of sea adventures in which the writers take part in the debate: see RLS in fiction]
Naugrette, Jean-Pierre (dirigé par) (1997). Dr.
Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Paris: Autrement (Collection
[collection of essays; illustrations; contributors: Jean-Pierre Naugrette (“Genèse d’un texte, jeunesse d’un mythe”), Jean-Jaques Lecercle (“Tissage et métissage”), Pascal Aquien (“L’étrange case du Dr Jekyll et de M. Gray”), Cécile Petit (“Cherchez la femme”), Richard Dury (“Variations sur la main de Hyde”), Francis Bordat (“Hollywood au travail”)].
Naugrette, Jean-Pierre (1997), “Genèse d’un texte, jeunesse d’un mythe,” in
In Jean-Pierre Naugrette. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Paris: Autrement
(Figures mythiques). 7-40.
[Introduction to the volume. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is full of silences, fragments and contradictions, which cause problems for film adaptations and illustrators. The text combines contradictory mythical references (Frankenstein’s monster, Faust, Satan, Theseus), and personal and collective anxieties. Written in the period when the science of psychology was being created, JH uses Hyde presented as Darwinian monkey to discuss ideas of the human personality that had not yet been fully formulated.]
Neill, Roger (1997). Robert Louis Stevenson and Count Nerli in Samoa: The Story of a Portrait. Banbury:
Red Lion Press.
Pericoli, Tullio (1997). Morgana n.2. Miasino (Novara, Italy): Dante
Albieri (distrib. Hoepli, Milan).
[portfolio of illustrations; including a series on RLS]
Petit, Cécile (1997). “Cherchez la femme”. In Naugrette (ed.)
(1997), pp. 83-97.
[The few marginal female characters in JH are mistreated or relegated to subultern roles: the product of uresolved Oedipal conflict, of the homosexuality that is hinted at, or perhaps because Jekyll is already an androgynous mixture of male and female. Mary Reilly doubles the text of JH and develops the theme of the opposition of the sexes.]
Sandison, Alan (1997). “Novel Adventures: Reading Robert Louis Stevenson”. Meanjin [Victoria, Australia] 56i: 161-69.
Schmid, Susanne (1997). “Emma Tennant’s Sister Hyde: Two Strange Cases of the Female Double”. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 45i: 20-32.
Alblas, Jacques B.H. (1996). “The Early Production and reception of Stevenson’s Work in England and the Netherlands”. Liebregts & Tigges: 209-219.
Alexander, Doris (1996). Creating Literature out of Life: The Making of Four Masterpieces. University Park:
Pennsylvania University Press.
[Ch. 2 “The Real Treasure in Treasure Island”, pp. 23-43. Explores the novel’s historical and social contexts and the process of its creation]
Arata, Stephen D. (1996). Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Identity and Empire. Cambridge: CUP.
[the “twin obsessions” of late-Victorian imperialism and fin-de-siècle degeneration panic in the Sherlock Holmes stories, Jekyll and Hyde, Dracula, Haggard, Kipling and Wilde; Ch 2 (pp 33-53) “The Sedulous Ape: Atavism, Professionalism, and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde” is a reprinting of Arata 1995]
Botting, Fred (1996). Gothic. London: Routledge (New Critical Idiom).
[Jekyll and Hyde pp. 138-142; defines gothic as “the sense that there is no exit from the darkly illuminating labyrinth of language”]
Brown, Neil Macara (2006). “Stevenson’s Scottish Books”. Scottish Book Collector 5iii
[S’s Vailima library]
Brown, Neil Macara (2006) “RLS Bibliopest”. Scottish Book Collector
5.vi (1996): 27-30.
[S’s Vailima library]
Clunas, Alex (1996). “Out of my country and myself I go': Identity and Writing in Stevenson’s
Early Travel Books.” Nineteenth-Century Prose 23i: 54-73.
[the treatment of S’s authorial self in his travel writing, his fereedom “to reinvent himself - to authorize himself, as it were”]
Cornwell, Neil (1996). “Two Visionary Storytellers of 1894: R.L. Stevenson and Anton Chekhov”. Liebregts
& Tigges: 171-185
[compares “Will o' the Mill” and Chekhov’s “The Black Monk”]
Costello, Peter (1996). “Walter Pater, George Moore and R.L. Stevenson”. Liebregts & Tigges (1996): 127-138.
Derry, Stephen (1996). “The Island of Doctor Moreau and Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide”.
Notes & Queries 43.iv: 437.
[Wells probably borrowed from Stevenson’s story.]
Frayling, Christopher (1996). Nightmare. The Birth of Horror. London: BBC Books.
[Ch. 3 pp. 114-161 is “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”. Despite the popular “book of the TV series” format this is a serious work, investigating in particular the development in the story of its composition and the way it has evolved in stage and film versions]
Hardesty, William H. (1996). “Odds on Treasure Island”. Studies in Scottish Literature 29: 29-36.
Stephen B. Haugh & Zane Publishing (1996). Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
San Diego, CA: Zane Publishing (PowerCD). CD-ROM. $8.95.
[This CD-ROM, aimed at school audiences (it contains a dictionary), consists of: a general discussion and analysis of the book (Overview; Introduction to JH; Life of RLS; Creation of JH; Response; Analysis), information on play and movie versions, stills and audio clips from the three main movie versions (Frederick March’s lecture on the duality of man and the equivalent after-dinner discussion by Spencer Tracy), a copy of the text, many short extracts (numerous reviews and passages from literary critics), photographs of Stevenson and his family. A well-researched collection on a rather old-fashioned “platform” (the advantages of CD-ROM apart from the audio clips not immediately obvious); it includes the whole text of Sullivan’s theatre version from the New York Public Library copy, so this is the first full publication of any version (later published in a definitive edition collating the three extant versions by Danahay & Chisholm (2005)).]
Houppermans, Sjef (1996). “Robert, Alexandre, Marcel, Henri, Jean et les autres: R.L. Stevenson and his
‘French Connections'”. Liebregts & Tigges: 187-207.
[Influence on Schwob, esp. “Le Train 081”; on Alain-Fournier; on recent writers such as Claude Ollier, Le Clézio, Jean Echenoz]
Hurley, Kelley (1996). The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration as the Fin de Siècle.
[a key scenario of late 19th-century gothic is “the loss of a unified and stable human identity, and the emergence of a chaotic and ‘abhuman' identity in its place; refers to RLS]
Issler, Anne Roller (1996, 2nd ed.). Stevenson at Silverado, The Life and Writing of Robert Louis Stevenson in California’s Napa Valley - 1880. ***: James Stevenson.
Jagoda, Susan Heseltine (1996). “A Psychiatric Interpretation of Dr Jekyll’s ‘Case'”. Victorian
Newsletter 89: 31-33.
[JH gives us a picture of the process of drug dependence - based on the behavioural characteristics listed in the American Medical Association’s Manual]
Jolly, Roslyn (1996). “Robert Louis Stevenson and Samoan History: Crossing the Roman Wall”. Bruce Bennett, Jeff Doyle & Satendra Nandan (eds.) 81996). Crossing Cultures: Essays on Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific. London: SKOOB Books. 113-120. Reprinted in Kucich (2003).
Jourede, Pierre & Paolo Tortonese (1996). Visages Du Double: Un Thème Litteraire. Paris: Nathan.
Kabel, Ans (1996). “The Influence of Walter Pater in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray”. Liebregts & Tigges (1996): 139-147.
Liebregts, Peter & Wim Tigges (eds.) (1996). Beauty and the Beast: Christina Rossetti, Walter
Pater, R.L. Stevenson and their Contemporaries. Amsterdam: Rodopi (Studies
in Literature, 19).
[papers from the 1994 colloquium at Leiden University to commemorate three writers who died in 1894; includes Peter Costello on the influence of Pater on RLS; Ans Kabel on the connection between Marius the Epicurean, Jekyll and Hyde and Dorian Gray; Tim Youngs on the ape-metaphor for social violence and degeneration in RLS; Sjef Houppermans on RLS, Marcel Schwob and Alain-Fournier, with affinities seen between Treasure Island and Le Grand Meaulnes]
Link-Heer, Ursula (1996), “Doppelgänger und multiple Persönlichkeiten. Eine Faszination der
Jahrhundertwende” [Doubles and multiple personalities. A “fascination” of the turn-of-the-century”.] Arcadia
[Medical science and imaginative writers had a shared interest in multiple personalities from about 1870 that contained quasi-mythological elements to create a relationship of “fascination”. The interrelationship of the two discourses is even shown in Taylor & Martin’s survey of cases that also includes Jekyll and Hyde in an explanatory note. Case histories were written like stories (a practice continued by Freud). Discourse produced discourse: after 1876 new medical cases sprang up like mushrooms (until Freud’s Studien über Hysterie, 1895, declines to use this model). One of these was of “Emile X” reported by Proust’s father, Dr. Adrien Proust in 1890. Another was Hélène Smith described by Théodore Flouroys (1899), who wrote in different styles of different subjects apparently as different personalities. Flouroys saw her not as a medium but as a hysteric with polymorphic personality who had great ability in the writing of pastiches. Proust too was a writer of pastiches, which he saw as a way of avoiding unconscious imitations. Jekyll and Hyde was just the tip of the iceberg of writings on multiple personality. The article ends with information on the interest of Gertrude Stein and André Breton in automatic writing and involuntary imitation and with the multiple authorial personality of Pessoa.]
Locatelli, Angela (1996). “Paradigmi del ‘Doppio' nell'episteme
vittoriana. Rivista di Studi Vittoriani 1i: 39-59.
[sees the Double as a “epocal cultural topos”; discusses JH, Dorian Gray, Secret Sharer]
Mack, Douglas S. (1996). “Dr Jekyll, Mr Hyde and Count Dracula”. Liebregts & Tigges (1996): 149-156.
[similarities and differences; Darwinianism; ends with a claim for JH’s essential Scottishness]
McLaughlin, Kevin (1996). “The Financial Imp: Ethics and Finance in
Nineteenth-Century Fiction”. Novel 29ii: 165-183.
[The application of the methods of political economy to moral questions was much debated in Victorian times, including in novels. Stevenson’s interest in finance was connected to his enthusiasm for America, its sense of aspiration and adventure, for example in the boldness of Thoreau’s economic speculations in the first part of Walden. Stevenson’s essay on Thoreau suggests a link between moral economics and adventure. “The Bottle Imp” is a tale of caution: it warns against diabolical pacts, and also turns on the deposition of “a caution” in the sense of a pledge in the establishment of a contract. In this case, the caution is Keawe’s life.]
Mallardi, Rosella (n.d. ). Il nuovo ‘romance' di R.L.
Stevenson. Bari: Laterza.
[collection of articles: (i) “La commedia dell'onore. Un racconto ‘arabo' di R.L. Stevenson” (Lingue e stile 24ii (giugno 1989); (ii) “‘Tra il popolo del sogno': rilettura critica di Treasure Island” (Il confronto letterario [Dip. Ling. e Lett. Stran. Mod., Univ. Pavia] 8 xv (maggio 1991)); (iii) “Lo strano caso di Dr. Jekyll e Mr. Hyde: una macchina narrativa perfetta per illustrare l'orrore verso e l'eversione di Hyde” (Annali della Facoltà di Ling. e Lett. Stran., Univ. Bari) 3 ser., 2i (1981)); “Il ‘romance' di Ephraim MacKellar' (no indication of previous publication); “‘The Enchantress': una ‘short story' per un matrimonio singolare”. In Aa. Vv. (1996). L'arte della ‘short story'. Il racconto anglo-americano. Napoli: Liguori.)]
Menikoff, Barry (1996). “Grub Street in a Velvet Coat: The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson” [review article]. Nineteenth Century Literature 50iv: 541-551.
Menneteau, Patrick (1996). “Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde: savoirs anciens et savoirs nouveaux”. Etudes Ecossaises 3 ["Aspects du XVIIIe siècle”, GDR Grenoble III (février 1996)]: 171-177.
[Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde can be read like a detective story. The enquiry takes on a scientific quality that suits the historical context of the development of sciences; but, when the reader expects the unravelling of a scientific truth about various crimes, he is provided with Dr Jekyll’s confession, which insists on a religious definition of human nature, as divided between its earthly and spiritual parts: the traditional conception of man is thus reasserted with new vigour in the face of modernity.]
Naugrette, Jean-Pierre (1995-6). “Le texte et son double: le cas de M. P. et du Dr Forsyth.” Otrante 8: 149-159.
Niederhoff, Burkhard (1996).
“The Double Devil’s Advocate. A Reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Short Story ‘Markheim’”. Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht
[a close reading that focuses on the double motif and on moral and psychological paradoxes. It also contextualizes the story by comparing it to one of its sources, Dickens' ‘Christmas Carol', and to other works by Stevenson himself, the poem ‘If This Were Faith' and the novel ‘The Ebb-Tide']
Pankow, G. (1996). “The Wrecker by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne - A modern detective story written a hundred years ago”. Esprit (Dec. 1996): 46-9.
Petersen, Per Serritselv (1996). “The Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Motif in Jack London’s Science Fiction: Formula and Intertextuality in ‘When the World Was Young’”. Jack London Journal : 105-16.
Rose, Brian A. (1996). Jekyll and Hyde Adapted. Dramatizations of Cultural Anxiety. London: Greenwood (Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies, 66). [stage, screen, radio & TV adaptations 1887-1990; the addition of race, gender, class and economic concerns which become part of the popular meaning of the story]
Riach, Alan (1996). “Treasure Island and Time”. Children’s Literature in Education 27iii: 181-93.
Sandison, Alan (1996). Robert
Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism. London: Macmillan.
[Reviews by G. Hirsch in Victorian Studies 1998 41ii: 295-7 (http://mural.uv.es/agipe/Modernism.html); Glenda Norquay in Journal of Victorian Culture (1999) 4ii: 252-6]
Sandison, Alan (1996). “‘Two-fold and Multiple Natures’. Modernism and Dandyism in R.L. Stevenspon’s New Arabaian Nights”. AUMLA [Journal of the Australian Universities Language and Literature Association] 1: 17-31.
Stewart, G. (1996). Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-century British Fiction. Baltimore/London: John Hopkins University Press.
[Discusses Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (pp. 359-76) in ch. 13 “The Gothic of Reading: Wilde, du Maurier, Stevenson, Stoker”: interplay of self-reference and reflexivity (359-60), doubling of signifiers (360-61), homophonic multiplication (361-2), pun as matrix (362-64), critical configurations of Hyde (364-5), one-way identification (365), Utterson as reader delegate (365-68), extrapolation hinging on interpolation (368), and “A Gossip on Romance” (369-70), ekphrasis (371), prosopopoeia (371-72), vicarious projection (373-74), reading as preternatural visitation (375-76).]
Sutherland, John (1996). Is Heathcliffe a Murderer? Puzzles in 19th-Century Fiction. Oxford: World’s
[pp. 184-8: “What does Edward Hyde look like?” - contrasts film/TV focusing on Hyde’s appearance with the “perfect blank” in Stevenson’s text; pp. 189-95: “Who is Alexander’s father?” - the reticent narrator of The Master of Ballantrae reveals through his precise annotation of dates that it is James who is the father of Henry’s heir, Alexander].
Terry, R. C. (ed.) (1996). Robert Louis Stevenson: Interviews and Recollections. ***: U Iowa P.
[50 recollections by his wife, stepson, mother, Frances Sitwell, Andrew Lang, Henry Adams and others]
Warner, Marina (1996). “Siren, hyphen; or, the maid beguiled: R. L. Stevenson’s ‘The Beach of Falesá.’” In Hena Maes-Jelinek, Gordon Collier and Geoffrey Davis, eds. A Talent(ed) Digger: Creations, Cameos and Essays in Honour of Anna Rutherford. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Watts, Cedric (1996). “The Ebb Tide and Victory”. Conradiana 28ii: 133-7.
Williams, M. Kellen (1996).
“‘Down With the Door, Poole’: Designating Deviance in Stevenson’s Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” English Literature in Transition
[Utterson’s desire to see the indescribable Hyde, discover his secrets and name his deformities (culminating in the breaking down of Jekyll’s door) resembles the programme of late-19th century criminologists, sexual pathologists and Realist novelists. Hyde, however, remains a “free-floating sign” (like the “nameless longings” and “anonymous desires” that Stevenson refers to in an essay), so that all the attempts to describe and narrate merely reveal their own inadequacy to represent.]
Youngs, Tim (1996). “Stevenson’s Monkey-Business: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”. Liebregts & Tigges (1996): 157-170. [Darwinianism; middle-class under threat]
Arata, Stephen D. (1995) “The Sedulous Ape: Atavism, Professionalism, and
Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde”. Criticism [Detroit] 37ii: 233-259.
[Robert Louis Stevenson’s depiction of criminal behavior in his famous novel entitled 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” serves also as an indictment against the potential excesses of the professional class whose outward respectability could hide certain degenerate tendencies. part 1, “The Atavist and the Professional”, examines how Hyde represents degenerate proletarian, decadent aristocrat and also (in the end) repressed middle-class gentleman; part 2, “The Seduous Ape”, argues that Jekyll and Hyde is “a displaced meditation on what Stevenson considered the decline of authorship itself into “professionalism””.]
Borinskikh L.I. (1995). “The category of ‘play’ in neo-romantic aesthetics of R. L. Stevenson”.
In *** (ed.) 5th International Conference “English Literature in the Context
of the Philosophical-Aesthetic Ideas”. Perm: Perm State University.
Brown, Neil Macara (1995). “A Wreck of Books”. Scottish Book Collector 4.x
[S’s Vailima library]
Brown, Neil Macara (1995). “Picking over the Bohns: Stevenson’s Vailima Library”. Scottish
Book Collector 5.i: (1995), 19-21.
[S’s Vailima library]
Davidson, Guy (1995). “Sexuality and the Degenerate Body in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, Australasian Victorian Studies
Journal 1 (1995): 31-40.
[The article sees JH in relation to contemporary discourses on physical and social degeneration. The post-Romantic middle ground of literature between rational and fantastic discourses is summed up in the two words “strange case”: a juxtaposition typical of the text’s problematization of oppositions. The text questions scientific controlling descriptions of deviancy, but is also conservative, in part conventionally seeing deviancy as coming from without and expressed on the physiognomy--and yet at the same time the oppositions between bourgeois males and the stigmatised Hyde are undermined by similarities and complicities. JH is seen as “an articulation of, and an attempt to exorcise, anxieties about social crisis in the mid-1880s”, with psychic and social disorder related to each other, especially through homosexuality used “as the master trope of disorder”.]
De Stasio, Clotilde (1995). “Un disegno fatto di isole: La mappa dei Mari del Sud da R.L. Stevenson a Paul Theroux”. 135-47 in Mariateresa Chialant & Eleonora Rao (eds.). Per una topografia dell'Altrove: Spazi altri nell'immaginario letterario e culturale di lingua inglese. Napoli: Liguori.
Halberstam, Judith (1995). Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke University Press. Ch. 3 “Gothic Surfaces and Gothic Depths: The Subject of Secrecy in
Stevenson and Wilde”. 53-85. Available as a series of reduced jpeg images in
the Library section of the Oscholars site.]
[Jekyll’s experiments recapitulate the dynamic of restraint and production that Foucault associates with the late-nineteenth century’s medicalization of sex; Hyde is a Gothic monster associated with a "vertiginous excess of meaning”. “The Gothic text… invites readers into a free zone of interpretative mayhem. The pleasure of monsters lies in their ability to mean and to appear to crystalize meaning and give form to the meaning of fear. the danger of monsters lies in their tendency to stabilize bias into bodily form and pass monstrosity off as the obverse of the natural and the human.” (85).]
Hubbard, Tom (1995). Seeking Mr Hyde. Studies in Robert Louis Stevenson, Symbolism, Myth and the Pre-Modern.
Frankfurt-A-M etc.: Peter Lang (’scottish Studies', 18: Publications of the
Scottish Studies Centre of the Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz in
[Review: Burkhard Niederhoff (1997). Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 45 (1997): 258-59: “Too often, Hubbard progresses by means of associative juxtaposition rather than logical argument”.]
Le Bris, Michel (éd.) (1995). Stevenson. Paris: l'Herne (Les Cahiers de l'Herne, 66).
[Introduction; 41 photos; translations of “The Castaways of Soledad', “The Go-Between', and other texts not easily available in English; original essays: Naugrette, Jean-Pierre. 'Poésie, distance, nostalgie', Mohrt, Michel. “Vérité et poésie chez Stevenson”. Reprinted essays and notices and extracts by Conan Doyle, Brecht, Masao, Rankin. Translated Stevenson-inspired texts by Hesse, Steinbeck, Barrie; Schwob’s four essays on RLS, Artaud’s screenplay of Ballantrae and 5 letters in which he discusses Stevenson. And translated interviews with Borges (int. by Balderson), Bioy Casares (int. by Balderson) and Mamoulian (on “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” int. by Atkins). Full bibliographies.]
McCearney, James (1995). Le pays Stevenson. Paris: Christian de Bartillat.
[A highly individualistic, often quirky reading of the Stevensonian oeuvre, seeking to delineate the imaginary universe, “le pays Stevenson”, created over time in the work itself. It is a place where art is vital to the human condition and friendship the highest value, where the nature of man and the world is always dual and it is difficult but necessary to resist evil, and where the clash of cultures brings out the best or the worst in humankind. An interesting perspective on Stevenson’s works providing an overview for the general (though informed) reader. (Hilary Beattie)]
Menikoff, Barry (1995). “Toward the Production of a Text: Time, Space and David Balfour”. Studies in
the Novel 27iii: 351-62.
[Catriona/David Balfour and its pre-publication history]
Naugrette, Jean-Pierre (1995). “Espace et Lecture de/dans Treasure Island”. Brugière, Bernard (ed.). L'espace Litteraire dans la Littérature et la Culture Anglo-saxonnes. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle.
Naugrette, Jean-Pierre (1995).
“Cartographies aventureuses”. Tropismes [Univ. Paris X, C.R.A.A.] 7: 63-102.
[The map and literature; the ambiguous nature of the Treasure Island map.]
Naugrette, Jean-Pierre (1995-6). “Le texte et son double: le cas de M. P. et du Dr Forsyth.”
Otrante 8: 149-159.
[Did Freud read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Certainly JH must be seen in the perspective of the interest in double-life and double-personality cases of the period. Combined respectable/disrespectable lives can be seen in Deacon Brodie and Burke, Hare and Dr Knox and are investigated in The Moonstone (1868) and Edwin Drood (1870).
According to Fanny Stevenson, JH had a double parentage: Deacon Brodie and a paper in a French scientific journal. Jacqueline Carroy (1992) suggests that Dr Azam’s 1876 article on the Félida case of “double personality” may have been the one that inspired JH. Certainly, JH can be seen as the literary reflection of a series of case-histories of double personality, which were themselves influenced by 19C fictional narratives. In its turn, JH played a part in the growth of psychoanalysis in its prophetic anticipation of the multiple nature of the human personality, the return of the repressed, the alienation of feeling “a stranger in my own house”, and the self-analysis in the last chapter. In addition “A Chapter on Dreams” explores the role of dreams in the unconscious life and the feeling of doubling that accompanies writing.(also explored in the last chapter of JH).
Though Freud was a great reader he doesn’t mention Stevenson. Yet a German translation of JH was published in 1930 and in 1933 Freud published “The Case of Mr. P. and Dr. Forsyth” in which patient and doctor are in a way doubles of each other. In a way, we can see JH as anticipating developments beyond Freud to Derrida: it is about a doctor who is doubled, who analyses himself as he doubles, and who doubles as he analyses himself.]
Niederhoff, Burkhard (1995). "Nachwort: “Die Metamorphosen eines Puritaners” “.
Robert Louis Stevenson. Dr. Jekyll und Mr. Hyde. Frankfurt a. M.: Büchergilde Gutenberg. 105-39.
[biography; critical analysis of Stevenson’s works; interpretation of JH.]
Pittock, Murray G.H. (1995). “The Naming of Characters in Scott and Stevenson”. Notes and Queries [Oxford, England] 42 (240)ii: 174-75.
Orel, Harold (1995). The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini. Changing Attitudes towards Literary Genre 1814-1920. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Ch. 5 'Stevenson and the Historical Romance' (pp. 37-41), Ch. 6 'Robert Louis Stevenson and The Master of Ballantrae' (pp. 42-49).
Rennie, Neil (1995). Far-Fetched Facts. The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas. Oxford: Clarendon. Pp. 210-218.
[traces the evolution of the Western view of the South Seas]
Rosen, Michael (1995). “Robert Louis Stevenson and Children’s Play: The Contexts of A Child’s Garden of Verses”. Children’s Literature in Education 26.i: 53-72.
[S had written about childhood, play and imagination before CGV, and at a time when serious studies of these phenomena had just begun in Britain.
It was the first collection of poems for children “expressed in the first person as if the writer were a child, addressed directly to a children’s audience” in which the author draws on memories of his own life. CG was quoted soon after publication (and Sully uses “Counterpane” in discussing childhood imagination in 1895). Archer complained that S avoided the pain of childhood, but the poems do include the child’s view of the uncomprehending and incomprehensible adult. CG is an experiment, expressing contradictory positions on childhood found in S’s own theorizing, with the group of poems on imaginative play particularly innovative and insightful. The poems can be divided into groups:
(i) those dealing with imaginative play with a first-person child’s voice: acutely observed, non-didactic and making no appeal to childish “innocence”;
(ii) those dealing with a child’s non-imaginative activities: more like conventional poems for children, betraying an adult presence and sensibility:
(iii) poems about the world seen through a child’s eyes: often with a small philosophical point, here the voice varies between child’s and adult’s;
(iv) those with an adult speaker: apparently didactic (though sometimes the message is undermined). ]
Rothstein, Jamie (1995). “Robert Louis Stevenson’s Anti-imperialism”. Diss. Abbstracts International 1995 Dec. 56:6, 2252A, DAI No. DA9536728 [N. Illinois Univ.]
Sandison, Alan (1995). Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism. London: Macmillan.
[S in the vanguard of Modernism (especially through his resistance to the authority of literary predecessors and his attempt to revitalize art through experiemental fictions); attention also paid to Stevenson’s essays]
Satpathy, S. (1995). “An Allusion to Stevenson in The Waste Land”. Papers on Language and History 31iii:
[S one of Eliot’s childhood favourites; reference to “Requiem” in WL; also the line “Nor under seals broken by the lean solicitor” may be a memory of Utterson (often in empty rooms, breaks seals; act of unsealing/knowing followed by fear and terror)]
Scott, Paul H. (1995). Defoe in Edinburgh and Other Papers. ***
[Scotland and its literary heritage]
Ungar, Krys (1995). “D-ro Jekyll kaj s-ro Hyde: 75 jaroj de Esperanta traduk-arto”. Fonto 15:169: 13-24.
[In Esperanto; on Esperanto translations of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde].
Winchester, Simon (1995). “‘Merry of Soul': the legacy of Robert Louis Stevenson”. The Smithsonian Magazine 26.5 (Aug. 1995): 50-8.
Wolf, Leonard (ed.) (1995). The Essential Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Including the Complete Novel of Robert Louis
Stevenson . New York: Plume/Penguin USA.
[Introduction 27 pp (popular impressions of JH from film versions; biographical background); text with footnotes; the appendices contain 4 related short stories by RLS; a text by Gautier; plans of J’s house; contemporary reviews; filmography and stage versions by Nancy C. Hanger.]
Yamamoto, Taku (1995). “Fictionalizing Colonial Conflict: Robert Louis Stevenson in A Footnote to
History: Eight Years Trouble in Samoa”. Shiron, Kawauchi [Sendai, Japan] 34: 61-78.
[In English; colonialism; adventure fiction.]
“Stevenson et les Siens” [dossier]. Magazine littéraire 321 (mai 1994) : 82-103.
[Contributors: André Le Vot, Jean Echenoz, Alvaro Mutis, Richard Holmes, Hugo Pratt, Patrick Raynal, Jacques Meunier; translated extracts from “Edifying Letters of the Rutherford Family”.]
Bozzetto, Roger (1994). “L’ dont le est une aventure.” Europe 770: 62-73.
[Stevenson as a writer of Bildungsromane.]
Brown, Neil Macara (1994). “Ex Libris RLS: Much Travelled Books”. Scottish Book Collector 4.vii (1994): 5-8.
Brown, Neil Macara (1994). “Le Ona’s Library”. Scottish Book Collector 4.viii (1994): 5-8.
Cairney John (1994). “The Theatrical RLS: An evaluation of the theatrical aspects of Robert Louis Stevenson”. PhD dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington, New
[1) Skelt’s Toy Theatre and juvenile dramatic writing; 2) S begins to “act a part” at Edinburgh University and acts parts in amateur theatricals; 3) Deacon Brodie; 4) 1884, the playwriting year at Bournemouth: Beau Austin, Admiral Guinea, Macaire, The Hanging Judge; with reference to Arthur Pinero’s 1903 lecture “Robert Louis Stevenson as Dramatist”; 5) early Victorian theatre and its influence on the Henley-Stevenson partnership; 6) Tusitala reading his work aloud at Vailima; 7) adaptations of Stevenson’s works by other writers for all performing media to date.
References to Stevenson’s life and works are used to reflect his lifelong preoccupation with the theatre and the theatrical potential evident in every element of his personality. This is the man of theatre as theatrical man. See also Cairney (2003).]
Caserio, Robert L. (1994). "Fiction Theory and Criticism. 2. Nineteenth-Century British and American”.
In M. Groden & M. Kreisworth (eds.). The John Hopkins Guide to Theory and Criticism. John
Hopkin’s Press. on-line
[p. 259: “Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is perhaps a narrativized theory of naturalism’s self-contradictory split between reason and bestiality”, i.e. the contradiction of scientist-novelist who observes human animals.]
Clunas, Alex (1994). “Comely External Utterance. Reading Space in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”. The Journal of Narrative
Technique 24: 173-89.
[How meaning is destabilized through the changing perspective of Jekyll’s house and identity; spatial discontinuities correspond to fragmented narrative structures and both cause a metamorphosis in interpretation. Utterson takes exteriors as expressions of interiors, and sees reality in terms of “good” and “evil”, but reaching the cabinet he finds no solution to the mystery. Lanyon’s account stands at the meeting point of the real and the fantastic. Jekyll’s account promises closure but Jekyll still clings to the opposition of good and evil that his narrative questions.]
Connor, Steven (1994). “Rewriting Wrong: On the Ethics of Literary Reversion.” Liminal Postmodernisms: The Postmodern, the (Post-)Colonial, and the (Post-)Feminist. Eds. Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 79-97.
Cotroneo, Roberto (1994). Se una mattina d'estate un bambino. Lettera a mio figlio sull'amore per i libri.
***: Frassinelli. Eng. transl. (trans. N. S. Thompson). Letters to My
Son on the Love of Books. ***: HarperCollins, 1998.
[one of the four “letters” explains how Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island instructs us on anxiety]
Dekker, George (1994). “James and Stevenson:
The Mixed Current of Realism and Romance.‘ Critical
Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life. Eds. Robert M. Polhemus
and Roger B. Henkle. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. 127-49.
[On “A Humble Remonstrance” and associated texts.].
Eigner, Edwin M. (1994). “The Master of Ballantrae as Elegiac
Romance.‘ Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens
40 (1994): 99-106.
[Reads The Master of Ballantrae as a precursor to twentieth-century meditations on the deaths of problematic heroes. Sees Mackellar’s narration as an attempt at self-identification. Argues that, by surviving, the “unheroic, sterile, prosaic Mackellar‘ serves to “redefine heroism.'
Everett, James D. (1994). “Stopped Motion: The Poetics of Containment in
Victorian Travel Writing.‘ Diss. U of Washington, 1994. DAI 55
[Examines travel writings of late Victorian era (including those of RLS) and shows how they attempt to “stop a moving world‘ by setting parts of it down in words.]
Federico, Annette (1994). “Books for Boys: Violence and Representations in Kidnapped and Catriona.‘ VIJ: Victorians Institute Journal 22 (1994): 115-33.
Foss, Chris (1994). “Xenophobia, Duality, and the “Other” Side of
Nationalism: A Reading of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde.'
Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 40 (1994): 63-76.
[Argues that Jekyll’s attitude toward duality results in xenophobia directed toward his Hyde persona. Asserts the potential for reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as an allegory of the dangers of xenophobia as exacerbated by ethnocentric British imperialism.
Harman, Claire (1994). Introduction. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories. By Robert Louis Stevenson. London: J.M. Dent; Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1994.
Hinchcliffe, Peter (1994). Introduction. The Ebb-Tide. By Robert Louis Stevenson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1994.
Jasper, Michael Burris (1994). “‘A Double Monster Born Dead”: The
Degenerate and the Criminal in Victorian Britain.” Diss. Kent State U,
1994. DAI 55 (1995): 2405A.
[Examines issues of abnormality, morality, and degeneracy in late-Victorian British literature, including that of RLS.]
Jumeau, Alain (1994). “The Master of Ballantrae: Roman d’aventures ou
tragedie?” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 40 (1994): 107-18.
[Argues that The Master of Ballantrae is not a merging of adventure and fantasy genres (both of which RLS had already explored with Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, respectively) but of adventure and tragedy with fantasy serving only to problematize the story’s conclusion. Maintains that “le triomphe ultime de la tragédie” confers depth to the adventure fiction genre.
Knight, Alanna, and Elizabeth Stuart Warfel (1994). Robert Louis Stevenson: Bright
Ring of Words. Nairn, Scotland: Balnain, 1994.
[Compilation of accounts of RLS by family, acquaintances, and scholars.]
Le Bris, Michel (1994). Robert Louis Stevenson. [Paris?]: Nil Editions, 1994.
Le Bris, Michel (1994). “Stevenson, l'Écossais qui rêvait des îles bleues”. Grands Reportages 149 (juin 94) : ****.
Livesey, Margot (1994). “The Double Life of Robert Louis Stevenson”. Atlantic Monthly
(Nov. 1994): Available
[An apologetic celebration, typical of the period of Stevenson’s exclusion from the canon. S’s life suggests why dualism was so important to him: bohemian child of conventional parents, Lowland Scot, invalid, exile—though the relationship with his father was the central dualism. S’s reputation has been harmed by association with children’s literature, by the fact that the few works he is remembered by do not constitute a recognizable oeuvre and by the fact that his life-view is not pessimistic. In his best work (Kid, JH and Weir) “perhaps in spite of himself, he failed to emasculate his art. He opens his eyes, and ours, to the confusion of reality”. Livesey concludes that “If Stevenson deserves a place in our adult lives, his reputation must… rest on only a few works”. ]
MacLeod, Dawn (1994). “R.L.S. in Perthshire.” Contemporary Review
265 (1994): 267-71.
[Describes stay of the Stevensons at Kinnaird Cottage, Pitlochry, during the summer of 1881. Cites contemporaneous correspondence.]
Magris, Claudio (1994). “Il guardiano del faro.
Nel centenario Stevenson” [The lighhousekeeper. The Stevenson centenary]. In
Claudio Magris (1999). Utopia e disincanto. Saggi 1974-1998. Milano:
[In this overview of Stevenson’s life and career written for the 1994 centenary, Magris (novelist, essayist and professor of German literature) emphasizes the “lighness” that had been praised by Calvino (in his 1955 essay on Treasure Island), talking of “luminosa gaiezza” (luminous gaiety), “una leggerezza ariosa” (an airy lightness) and “leggerezza mozartiana” (Mozartian lightness), this latter comment also echoing Emilio Cecchi who had called Stevenson “una sorta di Mozart del romanzo” (a sort of Mozart of the novel) in 1935 (when for Anglo-American critics Stevenson was an outmoded belle-lettrist). Stevenson “is a writer of arabesques, conscious that the compact and totalising image of the world and of history of the great nineteenth-century socio-realistic novel has been shattered” (156). Like Heine he “combines love for the fabulous past with Ariosto-like irony that dissolves it because aware of its unreality” (156).]
Manlove, Colin (1994). Scottish Fantasy Literature: A Critical Survey.
Edinburgh: Canongate [Ch. 6: “Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)”, pp.
[In addition to citing numerous other RLS texts, includes an entire chapter (6: 103-18) on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a rewrite of his earlier article in SSL 23. Labels the novella “urban Gothic.” Traces its “interrelatedness.” Shows its influence on short novels that closely post-date it.]
Mann, Susan Garland, and David D. Mann (1994). “Robert Louis Stevenson: Tales from the
Prince of Storytellers.” Huntington Library Quarterly: A Journal for
the History and Interpretation of English and American Civilization 57
[Favorable review of Barry Menikoff’s collection of RLS short stories.]
Menegaldo, Gilles (1994). “‘Markheim’, un récit emblematique du fantastique selon Stevenson”. Europe 72 (March 1994): 92-102.
Menikoff, Barry (1994). “‘The Problematic Shores”: Robert Louis Stevenson
in the South Seas.” The Ends of the Earth: 1876-1918. Ed.
Simon Gatrell. London & Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Ashfield, 1992. Vol. 4 of English Literature and the
Wider World. Gen. ed. Michael Costell. 141-56.
[Calls In the South Seas one of RLS’s “most original and imaginative experiments.” Conceives of Stevenson’s South Sea writings as predominantly philosophical rather than political. Pays particular attention to writings on the Marquesas.]
Niederhoff, Burkhard (1994). “Ein lungenkranker Abenteurer: Der Erfinder von Dr. Jekyll und Mr. Hyde: Vor 100 Jahren starb der Schriftsteller Robert Louis Stevenson.” Süddeutsche Zeitung 3 / 4 Dec. 1994.
Nollen, Scott Allen (1994). Robert Louis Stevenson : Life, Literature and the Silver Screen
. New York: McFarland & Company
[film adaptations and misrepresentations].
Rankin, Nick (1994). “The Strange Case of Robert Louis Stevenson”. BBC Worldwide (Dec.).
[2-page overview on the specific genius of RLS and his continuing interest as a writer]
Rose, Brian Andrew (1994). “Transformations of Terror: Reading Changes in
Social Attitude through Film and Television Adaptations of Stevenson’s Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Social and Political Change in Literature and
Film: Selected Papers from the Sixteenth Annual Florida State University
Conference on Literature and Film. Ed. Richard Chapple. Gainesville: UP of
Florida, 1994. 37-52.
[Uses film adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as “a “barometric” guide to shifts in popular attitudes toward social issues.” Argues that, because RLS’s work is a “tracer text', modifications to plot, characterization, and themes expose a given adaptation’s audiences attitudes toward various ideas and archetypes. (A refined version of Rose’s 1993 dissertation.)]
Sellin, Bernard (1994). “Narrator and Narrative Voices in The Master of Ballantrae”.
Proceedings of the Scottish Workshop of the E.S.S.E. Conference, Bordeaux, 1993.
Grenoble/Germersheim: G.D.R. Etudes Ecossaises/Scottish Studies Centre. 113-23.
[The narrative technique in MoB reinforces its meaning. The Preface (and editor’s note at the end of ch 6) already gives us a model of embedded narrative emphasizing the distance between observer and events and also the artificiality of the writing process. The portrait of Mackellar is as interesting as the confrontation of the two brothers. The clash between his vindication of the truth and his personal involvement is partly concealed by “a systematic reference to details and dates”. His admission of gaps in his personal knowledge disguises the way he undermines and invalidates the testimonies of others. There is also a clash between an asserted modest stance and the way he constantly promotes himself in the narrative and is obviously involved in a struggle for power. Two inset narratives are highlighted for special attention: the Master’s murder story told on the ship, and the final epitaph. The latter underlines the difference between the narrated Mackellar and the narrator Mackellar.]
Spuirru, Rafael (1994). “Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894).” Suplemento Literario La Nacion 24 July 1994: 4.Steele, Karen (ed.) (1994). The Sayings of Robert Louis Stevenson. London: Duckworth. Sutton, Max (1994). “Jim Hawkins and the Faintly Inscribed Readewr in Treasure Island.” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardien 40 (1994): 37-47.
Williams, Mary Kellen (1994). “‘Leaping Pulses and Secret Pleasures”:
Inscribing the Wayward Body in Late-Nineteenth Century Fiction.” Diss.
Washington U, 1994. DAI 55 (1995): 3526A.
[With other texts, uses Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to show how fictions that use “the wayward body” argue against the realistic mode and its tendency toward scientific intelligibility. Argues that anti-realist texts are precursors to modernist narratives.]
Angus, David (1993). “Robert Louis Stevenson: The Secret Sources.” Studies in Scottish Literature
28 (1993): 81-91.
[Traces the author’s search for sources of characters and settings in Weir of Hermiston. Links Lord Glenalmond with the historical Lord Meadowbank, the two Kirsties to women buried in the Old Calton Burial Ground, and the cairn to an obelisk in the same graveyard.]
Bevan, Bryan (1993). Robert Louis Stevenson: Poet and Teller of Tales. London: Rubicon; New York: St. Martin’s, 1993.
Block, Edwin F., Jr. (1993). Rituals of
Dis-integration. Romance and Madness in the Victorian Psychomythic Tale.
New York/London: Garland.
[The “psychomythic tale” is (i) a narrative about self vs society, self vs instinct; (ii) an inverted/demonic romance emphasizing psychological over physical action—not a melodramatic unravelling of a mystery but an individual’s struggle for psychic maturity; (iii) an exploration of fear and desire, of the instinctive, the uncanny and the forbidden; (iv) involving an individual with a mysterious or primitive past and illicit or archaic desires; (v) a suggested mapping of the individual onto society. The authors studied by Block are RLS, Paget, Pater, Yeats, Symonds and James. The psychomythic tale has affinities with classical tragedy; (i) mythic sources (“frequent adaptation of folktale and mythic structure”, Block 1993: 16), (ii) inevitable failure of the protagonist, (iii) structural reliance on coincidence and inexplicable forces (internal and external). (9-10).
pp. 11-30, “Generic Features and the Example of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”.]
Clunas, Alexander B. (1993). “‘A Double Word”: Writing and Justice in The Master of Ballantrae.'
Studies in Scottish Literature 28 (1993): 55-74.
[Characterizes The Master of Ballantrae as a combination of adventure fiction and investigation of the self. Calls it “an astute fable on the nature of fiction.” Traces Mackellar’s changing opinion of James and the resultant modification of the narrative.]
Dury, Richard, ed. (1993). The Annotated Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Milan: Guerini, 1993
Dury, Richard (1993). “Stevenson’s Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Textual Variants.” Notes and
Queries 40 (1993): 490-92.
[Lists variations between printer’s copy and first printed editions (British and American) of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Proposes that William Veeder, in previous examination of textual variants, likely only looked at the American edition, which has more variants from the printer’s copy than the British edition.]
Dolvers, Horst (1993). “‘Quite a Serious Division of Creative Literature”: Lord Lytton’s Fables in Song and R.L. Stevenson’s Prose Fables.” Archiv fur das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 230.1 (1993): 62-77.
Fessenden, Mary Tracy (1993). “Saving the Soul of the Social Body: The Secularizing of Social Difference
in Anglo-American Fiction.” Diss. U of Virginia, 1993. DAI 54
[Argues that, by rescuing “the newly contested boundary dividing human consciousness from brute matter,” Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tacitly supports “the moral legitimacy of racial imperialism.']
Graff, Marc-Ange (1993). "Le poète est lecteur”. Revue de
Littérature Comparée 2: 243-66.
[In the “Ode marítima” (1915), Álvaro de Campos (the “Futurist” and homosexual “persona” of Fernando Pessoa) the “Grande Pirata” sings “Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest. / Yo-ho ho and a bottle of rum” and then shouts (quoting Flint’s last words in Treasure Island) “Darby M'Graw-aw-aw-aw-aw! / Darby M'Graw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw! / Fetch a-a-aft th ru-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-um, Darby”. Shortly before this passage we have as a single line “Marooned!” which reminds us of Benn Gunn’s “No, marooned!” Flint’s last cry is a kind of satanic “Eli Eli lema sebachtani” in his inverted ecstasy. The struggle for treasure is seen by Álvaro de Campos as a struggle of forces and perverse desires against the forces of cohesion for possession of the ego.
"Pour toute une generation d’écrivains, Stevenson apparaîtra comme une modèle, une source d’ispiration ou comme le fondateur d’une type de littérature moderne” (p. 250).
Other writers who have praised or been influenced by Stevenson include Jack London, Blaise Cendrars, Pierra MacOrlan, Philippe Soupault, Jorge Luis Borges, Valéry Larbaud.]
Green, Meredith Anne (1993). “‘Merely a Petty Experimentalist”: Perceptions of Sympathy in Scientific
Medecine in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Texts.” Diss. Arizona
State U, 1993. DAI 54 (1994): 4101A.
[Citing multiple texts (including Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), argues that, with the advent of scientific medicine, literature became increasingly suspicious of physicians.]
Helgesen, Anne (1993). “A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured.” And I Hanske: Tidsskrift for Norsk Dukketeaterforening 11.4 (1993): 33-37.
Hendershot, Cyndy (1993). “Overdetermined Allegory in Jekyll and Hyde.” Victorian
Newsletter 84 (1993): 35-38.
[JH is an allegory: abstract parts of the psyche are reified. Jekyll reads his life in terms of crude binary oppositions, but the novel itself works “in an overdetermined allegorical mode”: id and superego (i.e. Jekyll-rejecting-Hyde) demonstrate their interpenetration, as Freud was to suggest. All the superego-dominated characters also have Hyde-like characteristics.]
Honaker, Lisa. (1993) “Reviving Romance: Gender, Genre, and the Late-Victorian
Anti-Realists.” Diss. Rutgers U, 1993. DAI 54 (1993): 939A.
[Examines the shift in the ideal of character in Victorian boys’ adventure fiction from the spiritual/female to the action-oriented/male. Cites Treasure Island, New Arabian Nights, Prince Otto, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.]
Jensen, Paul M. (1993). “Dr. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes:
The Silent Years”. Video Watchdog 17 (May/June 1993): 42-59.
[Differences with Stevenson’s story of silent film versions; compares commercially-available versions of the films.]
Johanningsmeier, Charles Alan (1993). “Buying and Selling Words by the Thousand: Newspaper Syndicates and
the American Literary Marketplace.” Diss. Indiana U, 1993. DAI
54 (1994): 3436A.
[Examines and evaluates the influence of newspaper syndicates on the literature in the United States from 1860 to 1900. Charts their effects on texts by many authors, including RLS.]
Kramer, Jürgen (1993). “Multiple Selves in 19th Century British Fiction”. Hans Ulrich Seeber & Walter Göberl (eds.).
Anglistentag 1992 Stuttgart. Proceedings. Vol XIV. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 388-96.
[The first section (referring to work by Elias and Horkheimer & Adorno) outlines the way the modern individual was formed (to permit the functioning of the modern state) through an acceptance of the dominance of work and reason, and the supression of instincts, passions and the irrational. The result is the production of Freud’s “foreign country within” (the repressed parts of the personality) which we can see as lying behind the narrative figure of the double or the multiple self. Hogg’s Justified Sinner and its presentation of a divided self can be seen as an outcome of the logic of the system of extreme Calvinism. In contrast Dr Jekyll an Mr Hyde is more about “a mere polity of multifarious … denizens”, as shown in narrative fragmentation (in contrast to Hogg’s binary division). However, remembering that the civilizing-process theories of Elias applies only to an elite, we can also see the 19th-century literary double as a representation of the way the established elite project what they suppress in themselves onto those that they exclude from their ranks. Hyde is therefore the social, physical and sexual outcast. In any case, doubles and multiple selves seem to be the price we pay for a certain type of civilization.]
Lapierre, Alexandra (1993). Fanny Stevenson: Entre passion et liberté. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1993.
[Portrays Fanny as an adventurous woman even without RLS’s influence. Inserts an large number of imagined narrative scenes; cf. Jean-Pierre Naugrette, Studies in Scottish Literature 28 (1993): 250-53.]
Lumsden, Alison (1993). “‘Travelling Hopefully’: Postmodern Thought and the Fiction of Robert
Louis Stevenson.” In R.D.S. Jack and Kevin McGinley (eds). Of Lion and of
Unicorn: Essays on Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations in Honour of Prof. John
MacQueen. Edinburgh: Quadriga, 1993. Pp. 115–38.
[In his essays S explores human activity as “multivalent, ambiguous and de-centred”: “we shall never reach the goal… there is no such place” ("El Dorado”), “the whole world a labyrinth without end or issue” ("Crabbed Age”). The same ideas are later explored in his fiction: the Treasure Island map-led quest leads to an empty “great excavation” and David Balfour’s relationship with his uncle is not resolved by his long journey. More importantly, Jim and David abandon naïve moral categories of good and evil and come to understand the multifaceted and ambiguous nature of human experience.
S’s attempt to accommodate to the lack of absolutes and essence (his “travelling hopefully”) has affinities with Wittgenstein, who saw language and human activity as not corresponding to final meaning but to the continuous evolution of “game rules”. Some of S’s characters (like Charles Darnaway in “The Merry Men) adopt this strategy while others (Charles’s uncle; Dr Jekyll) come to grief by their totalising system of strict binary categories of good and evil.
Ballatrae notably undermines any totalising fixed disourse, with the binary opposition of the two brothers continually called into question. Their apparent polarization is “not in essence a battle between good and evil, but, rather, a perversion… brought about by their attempt to negate multivalence”.
The multifaceted nature of experience is embodied by S in the romance mode, which captures multiplicity and slippage better than analytic modes of writing. In his later fictions he adds notable narrative indeterminacy and labyrinthine textuality, as in Ballantrae, where the alternative discourses and suggestion of supernatural elements continually undermine Mackellar’s authority and empiricism. ]
Maertens, James Warren (1993). “Promethean Desires: The Technician-Hero and Myths of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century
Literature.” Diss. U Minnesota, 1993. DAI 54 (1994): 4452A.
[sees Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as corroborating evidence for argument that the technician-hero represents the Victorian Promethean Complex, which attempts to rectify the split between disembodied reason and embodied love.
McLynn, Frank. J. (1993). Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. London: Hutchinson; New York: Random House, 1993.
Menikoff, Barry (1993). “Introduction: Fable, Fiction, and Modernism.” Tales from the
Prince of Storytellers. By Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Barry Menikoff.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1993. 1-37.
[Compares late-Victorian British (particularly Scottish), American, and French influences on the short story genre, and relates RLS’s attitudes toward the different national strains. Systematically traces themes in the short stories. Argues that the inconclusiveness with which so many of Stevenson’s works end is the result of the author’s attitude of ambiguity toward life—an attitude that anticipates literary modernism.]
Murphy, Jim (1993). Across America on an Emigrant Train. ***: Clarion Books.
[exerpts from Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains interwoven with maps, photographs and other background material about the building and early days of the railroads]
Pick, J.B. (1993). The Great Shadow House: Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction.
Edinburgh: Polygon, 1993.
[Includes the essay “Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Hyde: Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894).” Groups Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Frankenstein, Dracula, and other stories as “tales which live as myth” among those who have not read the texts. Traces the novella’s debt to Hogg’s Justified Sinner. Shows the influence of the Calvinist paradox on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, citing illuminating evidence in The Master of Ballantrae.]
Rose, Brian Andrew (1993). “Transformations of Terror: American Dramatizations of Stevenson’s “The Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and the Dramaturgy of Anxiety.'
Diss. Ohio State U, 1993. DAI 54 (1993): 2803A-2804A.
[Studies fourteen American dramatic adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Traces the development of recurrent motifs and structures chronologically.]
Shaddock, Jennifer (1993). “Culture Through Anarchy: British Representations of Anarchism,
1840-1907.” Diss. Rutgers U, 1993. DAI 54 (1994): 2592A.
[Explores the extent to which RLS maintained and subverted Carlyle’s and Arnold’s definitions of culture and anarchy with reference to The Dynamiter.]
Smith, R. McClure (1993). “The Strange Case of Valerie Martin and Mary Reilly.” Narrative 1iii: 245-64.
Stefan, Edwin S. (1993). “A Psychological Walk with Robert Louis Stevenson”. Journal
of Religion & Psychical Research 16.iv: 212-7.
[A brief overview of influences on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: immediately precipitating factors (the dream, Frankenstein and folk tales, French psychology), and predisposing factors (Cummy’s stories, self-experimentation by Edinburgh doctors, Dr Knox, Deacon Brodie).]
Waters, Karen Volland (1993). “‘The Perfect Gentleman”: Masculine Control in Victorian Men’s Fiction, 1870-1901.” Diss. U
Maryland—College Park, 1993. DAI 54 (1993): 1813A.
[In chapter IV, argues that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde articulates “the breakdown of gentlemanly self-control” in late Victorian culture.]
den Boef, August Hans (1992). “Drie vrouwen spelen met een schaduw: recente bewerkingen van [Three Women Play with a Shadow: Recent Versions of] Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” De Gids 155 (1992): 762-69.
Chatterjee, Lipika (1992). “Imperialist Discoures in the Works of Three Victorian Writers: Anthony
Trollope, R.L. Stevenson, and Olive Schreiner.” Diss. Pennsylvania State
U, 1992. DAI 53 (1992): 1524A-25A.
[In part, shows how RLS’s writings reflect British imperialism.]
Harman, Claire (1992). Introduction. Essays and Poems. By Robert Louis Stevenson. London:
J.M. Dent; Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1992. ix-xvii.
[Largely biographical. Relates the influences on RLS’s essays and poems by such notables as Lamb, Carlyle, Archer, and James.]
Heath, Tim (1992). “Boys’ Adventure Books and Late Victorian Imperialism.”
Thesis U Alberta, 1992. MAI 31 (1993): 1027.
[Examines Treasure Island and other texts as evidence to argue that European social construction of “the boy” enabled justification of British imperialism.]
Kramer, Jürgen (1992). “The Strange/r Case of The Beach of Falesá: A Reading of R.
L. Stevenson’s first realistic South Sea story’. In Buttjes, Dieter et al. (eds.). Neue
Brennpunkte des Englishunterrichts. Festschrift für Helmut Heuer zum
sechzigsten Geburtstag. Frankfurt am Main etc.: Peter Lang. Pp. 78-87.
[Stevenson’s immersion in Samoan culture is partly shown in his choice of names: (i) Wiltshire is a man of contradictions: a cheating “welsher” with noble instincts, a weak “wilt” (successor of Vigours) who gains strength and is known as “Vilivili”, meaning “to spin” or “to strive” in Samoan; (ii) Case is “a case” (a strange character) known as “Ese”, “other”, “foreign” or “strange” in Samoan; (iii) Uma is Samoan for “all” or “complete”; (iv) Falesá in Samoan means “sacred house” or “tabooed house” (like Wiltshare’s house); and there is a village in Samoa called Fálefá, 20 miles east of Apia (and Falesá is “the last village to the east”). Nevertheless the narrative is still seen from a European point-of-view with Wiltshire and Case as central characters. They are opposed but also interestingly similar: economic exploiters, convinced of their own racial superiority, desiring to murder each other, yet both devoted to a native wife. ]
Kreitzer, Larry (1992). “R.L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Romans 7:14-25.” Literature and Theology 6.2 (1992): 125-44.
Letley, Emma (1992). Introduction. Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes and Selected Travel Writings. By
Robert Louis Stevenson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. vii-xviii.
[Relates the emotional and cultural contexts in which RLS wrote his major travel essays. Notes the differences between the published travels and the manuscript diary.]
Menikoff, Barry (1992), “‘These Problematic Shores’: Robert Louis Stevenson in the South Seas”. Simon Gatrell (ed.) (1992). The Ends of the Earth 1876-1918 (Vol. 4 of English Literature and the Wider World). London: Ashfield. 141-155.
Miura, Toshiaki (1992). Gedai sakka no gohou to buntai [The Language and Style of Modern Novelists]: Stevenson, Maugham, Hemingway, Steinbeck. Tokyo: Bunka Shobou Hakubunsha, 1992.
Naugrette, Jean-Pierre (1992). Preface. Two Gothic Tales: Deux Contes noirs. By Robert Louis Stevenson. N.p.: Le Livre de Poche, 1992. 7-21.
Perrot, Jean (1992). “Pan and Puer Aeternus: Aetheticism and the Spirit of the Age.” Poetics Today
13 (1992): 155-67.
[Relates RLS’s essay “Child’s Play” to his portrayal of youthful characters (particularly Jim Hawkins) to Pater’s notion of “the poet-people.” Argues that RLS, not Barrie, initiated the “Pan archetype” of the unreliable young narrator.]
Royle, Trevor (1992). Introduction. Travels with a Donkey, An Inland Voyage, The Silverado Squatters. By Robert Louis Stevenson. London: J.M. Dent & Sons; Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1992. i-xiv.
Sanger, Andrew. Introduction. An Inland Voyage. By Robert Louis Stevenson. Heathfield, England: Cockbird, 1992.
Scheick, William J. (1992). “The Ethos of Stevenson’s ‘The Isle of Voices.’” Studies in
Scottish Literature 27 (1992): 143-49.
[Interprets “The Isle of Voices” as RLS’s expression of his own mortality and as an exposé on the relationship between life and art.]
Shaw, Marion (1992). “‘To Tell the Truth of Sex’: Confession and Abjection in Late Victorian
Writing.” Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History, and the Politics
of Gender. Ed. Linda M. Shires. New York: Routledge, 1992. 87-100.
[Uses Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau as textual basis for argument that Victorian confession narratives ironically serve to obscure rather than discover truth due to their gender-based concepts of reality.]
Sutherland, John (1992). Introduction. The Master of Ballantrae and Weir of Hermiston. By Robert Louis Stevenson. London: J.M. Dent; Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1992.
Amelinckx, Carol Cedar (1991). “Two Images of the Victorian Child: Stevenson’s and Rossetti’s Different Views.” The Image of the Child: Proceedings of the 1991 International Conference of the Children’s Literature Association, University of Southern Mississippi, 1991. Ed. Sylvia Patterson Iskander. Battle Creek, MI: Children’s Lit. Assn., 1991. 58-63.
Day, A. Grove (1991). Introduction(?). Travels in Hawaii. By Robert Louis Stevenson. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1991
Gannon, Susan R. “The Illustrator as Interpreter: N.C. Wyeth’s Illustrations for the Adventure Novels
of Robert Louis Stevenson.” Children’s Literature: Annual of the Modern
Language Association Division on Children’s Literature and the Children’s
Literature Association 19 (1991): 90-106.
[Argues that Wyeth’s illustrations are of scenes that RLS had not “made most striking” and therefore effectively add to the story.]
Gottwald, Maria (1991). “Romance in The Sire de Malétroit’s Door by Robert Louis Stevenson.” Anglica Wratislaviensia 21 (1991): 65-69.
Halberstam, Judith Marion (1991). “Parasites and Perverts: Anti-Semitism and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century
Gothic Fiction.” Diss. U of Minnesota, 1991. DAI 52 (1991): 2149A.
[Interprets Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (and other “Gothic novels') in light of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Argues that “monstrosity” arises out of Victorian fear of otherness and is expressed as parasitism or perversion.]
Hetzler, Leo A. (1991). “Chesterton and Robert Louis Stevenson.” The Chesterton Review: The Journal of the Chesterton Society 17 (1991): 177-87.
Lys, Waldemar (1991). “The War in the Members: The Concepts of Man’s Inherent Evils in R.L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Master of Ballantrae.” Kwartalnik neofilologiczny 38 (1991): 321-39.
Mallardi, Rosella (1991). “‘Tra il popolo del sogno’: Riletture critica di Treasure Island.” Confronto Letterario 8 (1991): 35-63.
McCracken-Flesher, Caroline (1991). “Thinking Nationally/Writing Colonially? Scott, Stevenson, and England.” Novel
24 (1991): 296-318.
[Interprets “Thrawn Janet” as a metaphor for Stevenson’s duplicitous attitude toward the English. Argues that RLS “exploits the Scottish sign’s heightened instability to disrupt the colonial narrative that has appropriated and debased it.” A burdensome essay with insufficient evidence and inordinate jargon, which, in the end, tends to undermine its thesis that Stevenson paid particular attention to issues of nationality. (JP)]
Moore, John D. (1991). “Emphasis and Suppression in Stevenson’s Treasure Island: Fabrication of the Self in Jim Hawkins’ Narrative.” CLA Journal 34 (1991): 436-52.
Morrow, Sean (1991). “A Copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Footnote to History Annotated by the
Author.” Notes and Queries 38 (1991): 334-36.
[Relates author’s chance purchase of copy of A Footnote to History returned to RLS by Baron von Pilsach, President of the Municipal Council of Apia. Expounds on relations between the two.]
Naugrette, Jean-Pierre (1991). “Discours du corps, ordre du discours: de Stevenson à Kafka.” Les Figures du corps dans la litterature et la peinture anglaises et americaines de la Renaissance à nos jours. Ed. Bernard Brugiere. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1991. 139-48.
Naugrette, Jean-Pierre (1991). “Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde: Dans le labyrinthe.” Tropismes (Univ. de Paris X) 5 ('L’Errance'): 9-37.
[A study of labyrinthine circular and repetitive structure in JH. Indeed, the labyrinth is a key interpretative motif, linked both to the story of Theseus and to the image of the modern city. Naugrette then shows how different reading of the text correspond to Eco’s three basic types of labyrinth and how the text itself is a kind of potentially infinite maze.]
Ridley, M.R. (1991). Introduction. The Master of Ballantrae and Weir of Hermiston. By Robert Louis Stevenson. London: J.M. Dent; Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1991.
Sanders, Scott Russell (1991). Afterword. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories. By Robert Louis Stevenson. Pleasantville, NY: Reader’s Digest Assocition, 1991.
Sandison, Alan (1991). “Robert Louis Stevenson: A Modernist in the South Seas.” Durham University Journal 52.1 (1991): 45-51.
Savater, Fernando (1991). “Stevenson, moralista.” Vuelta 15.180 (1991): 33-34.
Stoneley, Peter (1991). Introduction. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Complete Shorter Fiction. By
Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Peter Stoneley. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1991.
[Follows the contemporary popular and critical responses to RLS’s works. Notes the state of the publishing industry in RLS’s time.]
Tropp, Martin (1991). “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Schopenhauer, and the Power of the Will.” The
Midwest Quarterly 32 (1991): 141-55.
[Connects Schopenhauer’s theory that much of the will is repressed by the conscious mind to the distinctly different actions of Jekyll and Hyde. Asserts that Hyde’s brutality is a product of Jekyll’s personal/professional indifference toward bodies.]
Turlo, Margaret Mary (1991). “The Criminal in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.” Diss. U
California—Riverside, 1991. DAI
52 (1991): 2136A.
[Bakhtinian perspective. Explores the ideological conflicts inherent in the language/action discourse of criminal characters. Focuses on French and British texts, including Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.]