Journal of Stevenson Studies Volume 11

Journal of Stevenson Studies Volume 11 stevenson11.indb 1 30/10/2014 13:04 ii Journal of Stevenson Studies stevenson11.indb 2 30/10/2014 13:04 Journal of Stevenson Studies iii Editors Professor Linda Dryden Professor Emeritus Centre for Literature and Roderick Watson Writing English Studies School of Arts and School of Arts and Creative Industries Humanities Merchiston University of Stirling Edinburgh Napier University Stirling Craighouse FK9 4LA Edinburgh Scotland EH10 5DT Scotland Tel: 01786 467500 Email: [email protected] Tel: 0131 455 6128 Email: [email protected] Contributions to volume 12 are warmly invited and should be sent to either of the editors listed above. The text should be submitted in MS WORD files in MHRA format. All contributions are subject to review by members of the Editorial Board. Published by The Centre for Scottish Studies University of Stirling © The contributors 2014 ISSN: 1744-3857 Printed and bound in the UK by Antony Rowe Ltd. Chippenhan, Wiltshire. stevenson11.indb 3 30/10/2014 13:04 iv Journal of Stevenson Studies Editorial Board Professor Richard Ambrosini Professor Gordon Hirsch Universita’ di Roma Tre Department of English Rome University of Minnesota Professor Stephen Arata Professor Katherine Linehan School of English Department of English University of Virginia Oberlin College Ohio Dr Hilary Beattie Department of Psychiatry Professor Barry Menikoff Columbia University Department of English University of Hawaii at Manoa Professor Oliver Buckton School of English Professor Glenda Norquay Florida Atlantic University Department of English and Cultural History Dr Jenni Calder Liverpool John Moores National Museum of Scotland University Professor Linda Dryden Professor Marshall Walker School of Arts and Creative Department of English Industries The University of Waikato Edinburgh Napier University Professor Roderick Watson Professor Richard Dury English Studies University of Bergamo University of Stirling (Consultant Editor) Professor Penny Fielding Department of English University of Edinburgh stevenson11.indb 4 30/10/2014 13:04 Journal of Stevenson Studies v Contents Editorial.................................................................................. 1 Caroline McCracken-Flesher The future is another country: restlessness and Robert Louis Stevenson ............................................................3 Alan Sandison Remembering forward ........................................................... 17 Letitia Henville Ballad haunting: Stevenson’s ‘The Song of Rahéro’ ..............45 David Howard The Speak House .................................................................... 71 Nathalie Jaëck Kidnapping the historical novel in Stevenson’s Kidnapped: an act of literary and political resistance. ..........87 Ashleigh Prosser ‘His bachelor house’: the unhomely home of the fin-de-siècle’s bourgeois bachelor in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. ........ 105 Hilary J. Beattie Fanny Osbourne Stevenson’s fiction: ‘The Nixie’ in context ............................................................ 127 Review ..................................................................................151 Contributors ...................................................................... 153 Journal Notes .................................................................... 158 stevenson11.indb 5 30/10/2014 13:04 Journal of Stevenson Studies 1 Editorial Subscription breakthrough: we are happy to report that subscriptions to the Journal of Stevenson Studies will now be much easier. A system has been set up for payment through the University of Stirling Online Shop and this will at last allow direct payment by credit or debit card. The Online Shop (http://shop.stir.ac.uk) will require you to open a password- protected account to place your order and make a purchase: check ‘Product Catalogue / Schools and Divisions / School of Arts and Humanities’. This method will guarantee swift payment and delivery, and we hope it will lead to more subscriptions from both individuals and institutions. Back numbers are also available by this method, at a reduced rate of £10.00 per volume including postage. Volumes are deemed to be back numbers twelve months after first publication in October of the previous year. As always, the need for renewed and increased subscriptions remains pressing if we are to continue with hardcopy publication. Four of the essays in this issue of JSS were first presented at the seventh biennial Stevenson conference held in July 2013 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Our thanks go to the organisers Chris Danta and Roslyn Jolly for supporting the journal in this way, and of course for yet another successful international Stevenson event. The topic was Stevenson, Time and History, and we are pleased to publish contributions on this theme from Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Natalie Jaëck, Alan Sandison and Hilary J. Beattie. If ‘time’ and ‘history’ were key topics for the Sydney conference (and we believe that a further collection of essays on the theme is to be published from the University of New South Wales) three of the essays selected for JSS 11 seem to be fascinatingly engaged with questions of space and perception. Natalie Jaëck uses the map provided for Kidnapped to offer a theoretical disquisition on stevenson11.indb 1 30/10/2014 13:04 2 Journal of Stevenson Studies the necessarily incomplete nature of all fiction, or indeed writing itself, while reflecting too on the hidden agendas behind all acts of mapping and historical record. By such means she finds aesthetic and political ‘acts of resistance’ in Stevenson’s understand- ing of his art and indeed in the text and paratext of Kidnapped itself. The challenge to perception of previously unmapped space is the subject of Caroline McCracken-Flesher’s essay as she traces Stevenson’s travels in America, where he encountered a degree of difficulty in writing the new, and even in recognising his ‘old’ self, in territories hitherto so significantly untrodden in both cartographic and imaginative terms. Alan Sandison’s chal- lenging essay uses Stevenson’s own conception of the nature of art and the (apparently) utterly different aesthetic of Australian aboriginal art to explore the nature of aesthetic meaning in itself, and how we seek to tie it to, or to release it from, expression and the natural world around us – even as the deepest knowledge cannot be put into words. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, for permission to reproduce Emily Kam Kngwarray’s 1995 work Anwerlarr anganenty (Big Yam Dreaming) as part of this discussion. A different engagement with space appears in Ashleigh Prosser’s account of the bourgeois bachelor’s domestic lodgings in Jekyll and Hyde. Conceptual and cultural differences and debates on genre and literary formation return once again to ‘haunt’ Letitia Henville’s essay on Stevenson’s translation / version of ‘The Song of Rahéro’, while the New Zealand poet David Howard has been haunted by strangeness, beauty and Stevenson’s death in his poem ‘The Speak House’. Hilary J. Beattie outlines a different encounter with strange forces in Fanny Stevenson’s short story ‘The Nixie’, as she explores the contested nature of the story’s origins to assess Fanny’s relationship with Stevenson, her skill as an author, and her role as muse, or indeed as a ‘nixie’ in her own right. Roderick Watson Linda Dryden stevenson11.indb 2 30/10/2014 13:04 Caroline McCracken-Flesher 3 The future is another country: restlessness and Robert Louis Stevenson Caroline McCracken-Flesher In 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson set out for America in search of a transformative experience. Arriving in New York he declared himself ‘your sincere […] American’.1 Then rattling through Ohio on the emigrant train he imagined the end of one life and the beginning of another: ‘I dream no more / The dreams of other- where, / The cherished thoughts of yore; / I have been changed from what I was before’.2 He challenged: ‘No man is any use until he has dared everything’.3 Unfamiliar and new, America was the place of testing and transformation. This article explores the phenomenological discomfort of an author who, in Edinburgh, ‘aspire[d] angrily after that Somewhere-else of the imagination’, but in America encountered what he expected to be new and transformative as already old.4 As Stevenson headed west, America accumulated as a sign rather than a source of change – and pointed the aspiring author back toward the uncharted territory of that inner space, the mind. Jean Baudrillard theorises that representations gradually have distanced us from the real. By our century only simulacra remain.5 As an author, and thereby doubly caught within the signs of his century’s burgeoning cultural economy, Stevenson struggled to access newness. But the more he tried to express America, the more it manifested as a place already of the past, unoriginal and inauthentic. Yet things looked promising at the start. Stevenson posed his trip as a journey into the unknown. It was a precipitate escape from the ‘impersonation of life’ he currently lived in an old world mediated by oppressive parents.6 Edinburgh, in Baudrillard’s terms, was all map and no territory. In Picturesque Notes, published only the year before, the city is a whole ‘cabinet’ of curiosi- stevenson11.indb 3 30/10/2014 13:04 4 Journal of Stevenson Studies ties, but all of them known: Edinburgh is ‘Beautiful [… but] not

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