Robert Louis Stevenson The South Seas

IN THE SOUTH SEAS records Stevenson's travels with his wife Fanny and their family in the Marquesas, the Paumotus and the Gilbert Islands during 1888-9. Originally drafted in journal form while Stevenson travelled, it was then ambitiously rewrittento describe the islands and islanders as well as Stevenson's own personal experiences. IN THE SOUTH SEAS was published posthumously in 1896. Its combination of personal anecdote and historical account, of autobiography and anthropology, of Stevenson and South Sea Islands, has a particular charm.

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).

The South Seas Fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson investigates how Stevenson's fusion of imagination, travel experiences, history, and the oral traditions of Polynesian folklore and white sea yarns created novels and stories that were simultaneously realistic and symbolic. In its analysis of the author's portrayal of the conflict and compromise between islanders and white interlopers, this study reveals how Stevenson's Pacific works anticipated the use of exotic setting by Conrad, Maugham, and other writers.

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