Robert Louis Stevenson and the Meiji Enlightenment

Two great novelists, Franz Kafka and Robert Louis Stevenson at first blush seem to have absolutely nothing in common. But a detailed analysis of two distinguished works of thewriters, reveals surprising similarities in some aspects of their storylines. In particular, comparison of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with The Metamorphosis of Kafka shows that both works depict the issues of the struggle between Good and Evil through elements of metamorphoses that have common roots and motives. Focusing on the ideas that are implied rather than explicitly stated unveils deep correlation between these two seemingly unrelated novels

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South Sea Tales

10.1093/owc/9780199536085.001.0001 ◽

2008 ◽

Author(s):

Robert Louis Stevenson

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Cross Cultural ◽

Robert Louis Stevenson ◽

Global Culture ◽

Cultural Encounters ◽

Post Colonial ◽

The Pacific ◽

South Sea ◽

The Subject ◽

Subject Material

The literary world was shocked when in 1889, at the height of his career, Robert Louis Stevenson announced his intention to settle permanently on the Pacific island of Samoa. His readers were equally shocked when he began to use the subject material offered by his new environment, not to promote a romance of empire, but to produce some of the most ironic and critical treatments of imperialism in nineteenth-century fiction. In these stories, as in his work generally, Stevenson shows himself to be a virtuoso of narrative styles: his Pacific fiction includes the domestic realism of ‘The Beach at Falesé, the folktale plots of ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’, and the modernist blending of naturalism and symbolism in The Ebb-Tide. But beyond their generic diversity the stories are linked by their concern with representing the multiracial society of which their author had become a member. In this collection - the first to bring together all his shorter Pacific fiction in one volume - Stevenson emerges as a witness both to the cross- cultural encounters of nineteenth-century imperialism and to the creation of the global culture which characterizes the post-colonial world.

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