Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination
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A01=Ann C. Colley
archival research methods
Author_Ann C. Colley
Bedford Cord
Category=DSBF
Child's Garden
Child’s Garden
cultural identity formation
Dynamite Plot
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eq_isMigrated=2
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Foreign Children
imperial discourse
Juvenile Missionary
Juvenile Missionary Magazine
La Farge
LMS Missionary
London Missionary Society
Magic Lantern
Missionary Culture
missionary encounters Pacific
National Library
Native Preacher
nineteenth century empire
postcolonial literary studies
Red Sash
RLS
Samoan Government
Saranac Lake
South Seas
South Seas Missionaries
Stevenson South Sea colonialism analysis
Stevenson's Child
Stevenson's Friend
Stevenson's Imagination
Stevenson's Life
Stevenson's Mother
Stevenson’s Child
Stevenson’s Friend
Stevenson’s Imagination
Stevenson’s Life
Stevenson’s Mother
Younger Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780754635062
- Weight: 580g
- Dimensions: 153 x 219mm
- Publication Date: 16 Aug 2004
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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In her distinguished and hauntingly rendered book, Ann C. Colley provides a fresh insight into Stevenson's multi-voiced South Seas fiction, as well as into the particulars and complications of living within a newly established site of Empire. Bringing to light information from the archives of the London Missionary Society and from other sources, such as the Royal Geographical Society (London), the Writers' Museum (Edinburgh), the Beinecke Library (Yale University), and the Huntington Library (San Marino, California), Colley examines the intricate nature of Robert Louis Stevenson's relation to imperialism. In particular, she investigates Stevenson's complex relationship to the missionary culture that surrounded him during the last six years of his life (1888-1894), revealing hitherto unscouted routes by which to understand Stevenson's experiences while he was cruising among the South Sea islands, and later while he was a resident colonial in Samoa. Beginning with a history of the missionaries in the Pacific that reveals Stevenson's criticism of, yet ultimate support for, their work, and demonstrates how these attitudes helped shape his South Sea fiction, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination constitutes a major work of reconstruction from archival sources. Subsequent chapters focus on Stevenson's struggles with personal and cultural identity in the South Seas, and his interest in photography, panoramas, and magic lantern shows, revealing Stevenson's sensitivity to the ways light plays upon darkness to create meaning. In addition, Stevenson's serious commitment to political issues and his thoughts about power and nationhood are explored. Finally, Stevenson's recollections of his childhood are engaged not only to suggest an unacknowledged source (the juvenile missionary magazines) for A Child's Garden of Verses, but also to illuminate the generous reach of his imagination that exceeds the formulae of the missionary culture and the boundaries of the colonial construct.
Ann C. Colley is Professor of English at the State University College of New York at Buffalo. She has published numerous articles in such journals as The Kenyon Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Victorian Poetry. She is the author of Tennyson and Madness, The Search for Synthesis in Literature and Art: The Paradox of Space, Edward Lear and the Critics, and Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture.
