Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific

Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific
Author: Roslyn Jolly
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780754661955

Roslyn Jolly examines a crucial period (1887-1894) in Stevenson's life, focusing on the self-transformation wrought in his Pacific travel-writing and political texts. As his geographical and cultural horizons expanded, Stevenson's professional sphere also enlarged. A key feature of the study is Jolly's analysis of the resistance of Victorian readers, not only to the Pacific subject matter of Stevenson's later works, but also to his experiments with new styles and genres.

South Sea Tales

South Sea Tales
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2008-05-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0199536082

Roslyn Jolly is Lecturer in English at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the author of Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction (OUP, 1993).

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Impressions

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Impressions
Author: Carla Manfredi
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2018-11-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 331998313X

This book tackles photography’s role during Robert Louis Stevenson’s travels throughout the Pacific Island region and is the first study of his family’s previously unpublished photographs. Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, the book integrates photographs with letters, non-fiction, and poetry, and includes much unpublished material. The original readings of photographs and non-fiction highlight Stevenson’s engagement with colonial ideology and reality and advance new arguments about Victorian travel, settlement, and colonialisms in the Pacific. Like the Stevensons, the book moves from the Marquesas to the atolls of the Gilbert Islands in Micronesia; from the Kingdom of Hawai‘i’s political ambitions to Samoan plantations and the Stevensons’ settlement at Vailima. Central to this study is the notion that Pacific history and Pacific Island cultures matter to the interpretation of Stevenson's work, and a rigorous historical and cultural contextualization ensures that local details structure literary and photographic interpretation. The book’s historical grounding is key to its insightful conclusions regarding travel, settlement, photography, and colonialism.

Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific

Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific
Author: Roslyn Jolly
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351902741

Robert Louis Stevenson's departure from Europe in 1887 coincided with a vocational crisis prompted by his father's death. Impatient with his established identity as a writer, Stevenson was eager to explore different ways of writing, at the same time that living in the Pacific stimulated a range of latent intellectual and political interests. Roslyn Jolly examines the crucial period from 1887 to 1894, focusing on the self-transformation wrought in Stevenson's Pacific travel-writing and political texts. Jolly shows how Stevenson's desire to understand unfamiliar Polynesian and Micronesian cultures, and to record and intervene in the politics of Samoa, gave him opportunities to use his legal education, pursue his interest in historiography, and experiment with anthropology and journalism. Thus as his geographical and cultural horizons expanded, Stevenson's professional sphere enlarged as well, stretching the category of authorship in which his successes as a novelist had placed him. Rather than enhancing his stature as a popular writer, however, Stevenson's experiments with new styles and genres, and the Pacific subject matter of his later works, were resisted by his readers. Jolly's analysis of contemporary responses to Stevenson's writing, gleaned from an extensive collection of reviews, many of which are not readily available, provides fascinating insights into the interests, obsessions, and resistances of Victorian readers. As Stevenson sought to escape the vocational straightjacket that confined him, his readers just as strenuously expressed their loyalty to outmoded images of Stevenson the author, and their distrust of the new guises in which he presented himself.

Treasured Islands

Treasured Islands
Author: Lowell Don Holmes
Publisher: Sheridan House, Inc.
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2001
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781574091304

Not only the British writer himself, already famous for novels and poems, but his family with him took to the sea between 1888 and 1890 to search Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia for Robert's health and adventure. Writer and film maker Holmes (emeritus anthropology, Wichita State U. Kansas) has