The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson

By taking into account Robert Louis Stevenson's extraordinary thematic and generic diversity, as well as his impressive geographical range, this collection is the first anthology to situate Stevenson within a detailed social, political, and literary context. Essays explore the author's relationship with late-nineteenth-century publishing, psychology, travel, colonialism, and the emergence of modernism. Focusing on changes in Stevenson's publishing and cultural life during the second half of the nineteenth century, this anthology highlights Stevenson's investment in a theory of literature and realism and his interest in the unconscious and conceptions of childhood. Contributors also trace Stevenson's literary contexts from Scotland to the South Pacific, showing him to be key to the understanding of globalization and cultural heterogeneity in the late nineteenth century.