Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson

Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body is the first book-length study about the influence of travel on Robert Louis Stevensons writings, both fiction and nonfiction. Within the contexts of late-Victorian imperialism and ethnographic discourse, the book offers original close readings of individual works by Stevenson while bringing new theoretical insights to bear on the relationship between travel, authorship, and gender identity in the Victorian fin de sicle. Oliver S. Buckton develops cruising as a critical term, linking Stevensons leisurely mode of travel with the striking narrative motifs of disruption and fragmentation that characterize his writings. Buckton traces the development of Stevensons career from his early travel books to show how Stevensons major works of fiction, such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Ebb-Tide, draw on innovative techniques and materials Stevenson acquired in the course of his global travels. Exploring Stevensons pivotal role in the revival of romance in the late nineteenth century, Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson highlights Stevensons treatment of the human body as part of his resistance to realism, arguing that the energies and desires released by travel are often routed through disturbingly resistant or darkly comic corporeal figures. Buckton gives extensive attention to Stevensons writing about the South Seas, arguing that his groundbreaking critiques of European colonialism are formed in awareness of the fragility and desirability of Polynesian bodies and island landscapes. Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson will be indispensable to all admirers of Stevenson as well as of great interest to readers of travel writing, Victorian ethnography, gender studies, and literary criticism.