The wizards and the man-eaters - the white man’s dark lies in Stevenson’s South Sea fiction.

Abstract

The article analyses the imbalanced power-relations between the native inhabitants and the British colonizers in the South Pacific Isles as portrayed in Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Sea Fiction. It is argued that parallel to Stevenson’s detailed historical descriptions of the isles, the South Sea Fiction engages critically with the British colonial discourse as well as with the ideologically-informed accounts of the isles that had been circulating in Europe following James Cook’s expedition. In the resulting fabulous entanglement of the white man’s narratives and the native stories, the disproportion in powers gives advantage to the white man’s sinister tales.

Keywords

• R.L. Stevenson
• South Sea Fiction
• The Bottle Imp
• The Beach of Falesá
• colonialism