Changing Authorial Perspectives in R. L. Stevenson’s Pacific Travel Narratives

Abstract

R. L. Stevenson’s Pacific travels shaped the last part of the author’s life both as a man and as a writer, changing his personal and authorial attitude. His first cruise from San Francisco to the Pacific on the yacht Casco was not only ‘the dream of a life realised’ (Letters 193), but also represented a business opportunity, since the literary agent S. S. McClure suggested that he write travel letters with the promise of an income able to defray the expenses of his journey and provide a good profit. Stevenson’s letters were later to become a volume of anthropological considerations on the culture of the Pacific, In the South Seas (1890). The neat difference between the letters and this volume, which however share the same content, relies on the author’s own idea that his cruise had posed several ‘questions of race and civilization’ (Letters 6: 213), requiring a strong sociological focus hardly to be conveyed through letter-writing. The aim of this paper is to present Stevenson’s account of his Pacific experience as conveyed through both In the South Seas and his letters, in order to underline the author’s growing anthropological, historical and legal commitment, which was to have a crucial influence on his Pacific narrative fiction.

Keywords

• colonialism
• letter-writing
• anthropology
• Pacific
• fiction