Durham E-Theses Time, Space and Dialogism in Robert Louis Stevenson's Fiction CARLE, NAOMI,JANE How to cite: CARLE, NAOMI,JANE (2015) Time, Space and Dialogism in Robert Louis Stevenson's Fiction, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/10938/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk Carle 1 Abstract Time, Space and Dialogism in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Fiction Naomi Carle It is now something of a commonplace to discuss Robert Louis Stevenson as an innovator of romance. Genre debates at the fin-de-siècle have been well researched in relation to his fiction and, increasingly, his critical writings. Since Edwin Eiger (1966) and Robert Kiely (1964) published studies on Stevenson’s romance, the interplay between romance and realism that is evident in much of his work has been identified by Roslyn Jolly (1999), Roderick Watson (2004), Hilary J. Beattie (2004) and Michael Saler (2012) to name but a few. Rather than viewing this phenomenon through the lens of genre, which, as Anna Vaninskaya (2008) points out, can lead to unhelpful complications, it is more rewarding to understand Stevenson’s new romance aesthetic as related to his experimentation with time and space. Part of Stevenson’s approach to reviving the romance, set out in “A Gossip on Romance” and “A Humble Remonstrance”, involved adopting a serious literary perspective, rather than treating it as a lesser fictional mode. This aspiration included reinvigorating the traditional spaces of romance by investing them with a more complex temporality, creating new fictional worlds that operated as Bakhtinian chronotopes. Stevenson’s fiction invariably takes a “polychronotopic” form (following Pearce [1994]), which introduces a dialogic relationship between different methods of constructing time- space within a single text. Through this, Stevenson critiques traditional generic assumptions about the hero’s interaction with the romance world and applies a self-reflexive approach to understanding the text he is in the act of producing. This internal dialogic is often exposed in the narrative through Stevenson’s characters who behave beyond the scope of traditional “heroes”, often providing a mismatching perspective to that suggested by the worlds they inhabit over the course of their adventures. Stevenson transformed the romance for a new audience in a similar way to that which Bakhtin traces for the novel in Dostoevsky’s work. Carle 2 Carle 3 Time, Space and Dialogism in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Fiction Naomi Jane Carle PhD Department of English Studies Durham University 2014 Carle 4 Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................ 1 Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. 8 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 11 Reading Time and Space ................................................................................................... 15 Chronotopes ....................................................................................................................... 20 Dialogic Stevenson ............................................................................................................ 26 A New Romance Aesthetic ................................................................................................ 31 Chapter I: Ships..................................................................................................................... 36 Speech Genres at Sea: Jim’s Lessons in Sailor-Speak ....................................................... 40 Breaking the Chain of Command....................................................................................... 48 Shipwrecked: Recuperating a Collaborative Tale .............................................................. 57 Conclusions ........................................................................................................................ 64 Chapter II: Island .................................................................................................................. 66 Spoiling all the fun: Island Nightmares ............................................................................. 68 Islands as Motivic Chronotopes ......................................................................................... 81 Meeting of Minds: Emergent Islands ................................................................................. 85 Chapter III: Forests ............................................................................................................... 98 “And yet the forest has been civilised throughout”: Historicising the Hero .................... 101 The Dialogic Forest: Double-Words and Revelations ..................................................... 111 Double-voice of the Forest ............................................................................................... 121 Conclusions ...................................................................................................................... 129 Chapter IV: Master Chronotopes ........................................................................................ 130 Defining the Master Chronotope: Bakhtin’s World ......................................................... 130 Stevenson’s Fin-de-Siècle Vision: ‘The Pavilion on the Links’ ...................................... 139 Chapter V: City ................................................................................................................... 150 Stevenson and the Short Story: Subjectivity in the City .................................................. 154 The Protagonist-Hero and Failed Flâneurie: Navigating the City ................................... 158 Blurring Boundaries: Reading the Subjective City .......................................................... 167 Carle 5 Conclusions ...................................................................................................................... 176 Chapter VI: The Estate ........................................................................................................ 179 Dialogic Chronotopes ...................................................................................................... 185 Reading between Chronotopes......................................................................................... 194 Pitfalls of Communication ............................................................................................... 200 Conclusions ...................................................................................................................... 203 Afterword ............................................................................................................................. 205 Appendices ........................................................................................................................... 208 Appendix 1 ....................................................................................................................... 208 Appendix 2 ....................................................................................................................... 209 Works Cited ......................................................................................................................... 210 Carle 6 Carle 7 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author's prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. Carle 8 Acknowledgements Appropriately enough, this thesis has not emerged in isolation. I have been privileged to undertake the journey not only within the context of a vibrant postgraduate community in Durham English Department, but the wider region of the North East. Over the past three and a half years, I have been involved with various reading and research groups, academic networks and college groups. In particular, I’ve benefited from the opportunity to lead sessions and give papers at the North East Nineteenth Century reading group, based in Newcastle, the Narrating Time seminar series, funded by the Institute of Advanced Study, in Durham and St Aidan’s College SCR lecture series. The conversations after these papers always proved enormously stimulating – particularly in the days of confusion when I first started to work out how the chronotope might be applied to Stevenson’s fiction. My research has been more generally, but no less greatly, enriched from hearing speakers at an array of IAS workshops and events during the academic year 2011/12 when the theme was “Time”, and from attending departmental research