The Letters Of William Ernest Henley To Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text explores the genesis, production and the critical appreciation of the illustrations to the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson is one of the most copied and interpreted authors of the late nineteenth century, especially his novels Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. These interpretations began with the illustration of his texts in their early editions, often with Stevenson’s express consent, and this book traces Stevenson’s understanding and critical responses to the artists employed to illustrate his texts. In doing so, it attempts to position Stevenson as an important thinker and writer on the subject of illustrated literature, and on the marriage of literature and visual arts, at a moment preceding the dawn of cinema, and the rejection of such popular tropes by modernist writers of the early twentieth century.

'Robert Louis Stevenson, Literary Networks and Transatlantic Publishing in the 1890s' investigates Stevenson and the geographies of his literary networks during the last years of his life and after his death. It profiles a series of figures who worked with Stevenson, negotiated his publications on both sides of the Atlantic, wrote for him or were inspired by him. Using archival material, correspondence, fiction and biographies it moves across these literary networks. It deploys the concept of 'literary prosthetics' to frame its analysis of gatekeepers, tastemakers, agents, collaborators and authorial surrogates in the transatlantic production of Stevenson's writing. Case studies of understudied individuals and broader consideration of the networks they represent, contributes to the knowledge of transatlantic publishing in the 1890s, understanding of transatlantic culture, Stevenson studies, current interest in the workings of literary communities and in nineteenth-century mobility.

This wide-ranging collection is the first to set Robert Louis Stevenson in detailed social, political and literary contexts.The book takes account of both Stevenson's extraordinary thematic and generic diversity and his geographical range. The chapters explore his relation to late nineteenth-century publishing, psychology, travel, the colonial world, and the emergence of modernism in prose and poetry. Through the pivotal figure of Stevenson, the collection explores how literary publishing and cultural life changed across the second half of the nineteenth century. Stevenson emerges as a complex writer, author both of hugely popular boys' stories and of seminally important adult novels, as well as the literary figure who debated with Henry James the theory of fiction and the nature of realism.The collection shows how interest in the unconscious and changes in the conception of childhood demand that we re-evaluate our ideas of his writing. Individual essays by international experts trace Stevenson' lit

A playful, self-reflexive tale of politics and ethics. In Prince Otto, first published in serial form in 1885, Stevenson uses his genius for adventure and romance to explore some decidedly grown-up themes. The tiny German state of Grunewald seems to be a principality of the world of fairy-tale. But its ruler is beset in public by the forces of modern politics, and troubled in private by an unhappy marriage. Ill-prepared to deal with either, Otto is forced to choose between them.Key Features: * This first fully edited edition of the novel will provoke readers to think again about the scope and purpose of Stevenson's brilliant story-telling* Explores the most modern of themes, the moral compromises required by marriage: a romance in which the marriage of the hero and the heroine is not the happy conclusion of the plot, but the problem that the plot has to resolve* A fascinating text for what it tells us about Stevenson's goals and aspirations at this crucial stage of his career, and about the changing nature of the novel in English at the end of the nineteenth-century