Robert Louis Stevenson: The Mediation of Literary Reputation and the Advent of Modernism

This thesis seeks to place Robert Louis Stevenson as an important contributor to the emergence of Modernism. In exploring this, the thesis suggests that Stevenson’s contribution to literary Modernism has frequently been overlooked due to several critical factors. Foremost amongst these is the issue of mediation. The thesis will discuss how Stevenson’s posthumous reputation was constructed and reorientated by figures unsympathetic to his commitment to stylistic innovation. The figures so discussed include Stevenson’s literary editor Sidney Colvin and his immediate family, particularly Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson. The thesis also draws attention to the disproportionate influence individuals who were otherwise peripheral to Stevenson’s life had in defining his reputation after his death – Lord Charles Guthrie being first among these.Countering the image propagated by these earliest advocates, this thesis will demonstrate that far from being a conservative writer, Stevenson was a self-reflexive and innovative author, with a developed sense of the need to consciously develop a literary style. Through detailed analysis of individual texts (principally The Master of Ballantrae, The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide) in a manner alert to this, the central thread of the thesis’s argument will be developed.Stevenson’s work will be contextualised in terms of the genres from which it developed and which were dominant in the literary culture at the time he was writing. By doing so the thesis suggests that Stevenson reframed the norms of both Realism and Romance in order to innovate a new style which was reflective, critical of dominant discourse, and – crucially – anticipative of future forms.Reflecting on the extent to which the early mediation of Stevenson’s image and work defined his critical reception in much of the twentieth-century the thesis will close by considering the significance of new forms of mediation and reflecting on how these will influence the perception of Stevenson’s work in the remainder of the century