Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination

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, the Writers' Museum (Edinburgh), the Beinecke Library (Yale University), the Huntington Library (San Marino, California), and the Royal Geographical Society (London), Colley examines Stevenson's complex involvement with the colonial imagination. Her exploration of the missionary culture surrounding Robert Louis Stevenson during the last six years of his life (1888-1894) uncovers hitherto unscouted routes by which to understand Stevenson's multi-layered fiction as well as his experiences in the South Seas, both as a traveler and as a resident colonial in Samoa. This context offers a new and important approach to Stevenson's views on memory, alienation, power, class, and nationhood.

Ann C. Colley is Professor of English at the State University College of New York at Buffalo.