South Sea Tales

Author(s): Robert Louis Stevenson

Fiction.

2008 - RE-ISSUE 195x130mm / 289pp The literary world was shocked when in 1889, at the height of his career, Robert Louis Stevenson announced his intention to settle permanently on the Pacific island of Samoa. His readers were equally shocked when he began to use the subject material offered by his new environment, not to promote a romance of empire, but to produce some of the most ironic and critical treatments of imperialism in nineteenth-century fiction. In these stories, as in his work generally, Stevenson shows himself to be a virtuoso of narrative styles: his Pacific fiction includes the domestic realism of 'The Beach at Falese, the folktale plots of 'The Bottle Imp' and 'The Isle of Voices', and the modernist blending of naturalism and symbolism in The Ebb-Tide. But beyond their generic diversity the stories are linked by their concern with representing the multiracial society of which their author had become a member. In this collection - the first to bring together all his shorter Pacific fiction in one volume - Stevenson emerges as a witness both to the cross- cultural encounters of nineteenth-century imperialism and to the creation of the global culture which characterizes the post-colonial world.


Product Information

Roslyn Jolly is Lecturer in English at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the author of Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction (OUP, 1993).

The Beach of Falesa; The Bottle Imp; The Isle of Voices; The Ebb-Tide; A Trio and Quartette; The Cart-Horses and the Saddle-Horse; Something In It.

General Fields

  • : 9780199536085
  • : Oxford University Press
  • : Oxford University Press
  • : May 2008
  • : United Kingdom
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Robert Louis Stevenson
  • : Paperback
  • : 823.8
  • : 336
  • : 1 map