Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2004. Graduate Programme in / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 276-285). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ99238

Thèse--Université de Paris. / Bibliography: p. [209]-214.

Thesis (B.A.Hons.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of History, 1974.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 1984. / Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Department of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow, 1984. Inlcudes bibliographical references. Print version also available.

Zugl.: Paderborn, Univ., Diss., 2007

Inaug.-Diss.--Kiel. / Lebenslauf. "Verzeichnis der benutzten Literatur": p. [134]-138.

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This thesis attempts to show that Robert Louis Stevenson's romantic novels experiment in combining romance and realism. To achieve his objective, Stevenson sometimes imitates earlier writers of romance, sometimes differs from them. He imitates traditional romance by including the motifs of love, adventure, combat, and quest. He juxtaposes good and evil and makes good defeat evil. He deviates from traditional romance, however, by creating villains not altogether evil, such as Long John Silver in Treasure Island. He also deviates from traditional romance by creating incidents where evil overwhelms and drags the good down into moral degradation, as in the encounters between the Durie brothers in The Master of Ballantrae or between Frank and Archie in Weir of Hermiston. Stevenson also includes in his romantic novels some elements of realism--the use of common people, the modeling of characters after known personalities, and the association of fictional events with history. He uses a truly romantic character such as the Prince in Prince Otto to make a moral point about the place of aptitude and interest in assigning roles to people. He also uses romantic adventures to teach moral lessons, as in The Dynamiter. Stevenson establishes that romance functions not only to delight but also to teach; it is not to encourage escape but to serve a pragmatic purpose. / Master of Arts

The idea we have of a literary tradition is not a matter of fixity. In a living language the canon is continually being added to and therefore, to the extent that the tradition is present to us and simultaneous with us, liable to be changed by new work. Fresh contributions, innovative of necessity, realign our picture of the past and, above all, redefine it. Writers, to paraphrase Jorge Luis Borges, create their own ancestors. So it is that a hitherto peripheral writer or a form considered "low" may be reassessed and enlisted in the perpetual struggle with narrative forms. Just this is the case of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) whose experimental transformations of a number of genres of fiction have an almost exemplary status at the present time. Meanwhile, Vladimir Nabokov's lectures on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Borges' ubiquitous remarks on the Scots writers illuminate both his work and theirs. ' He is now an ancestor and requires the consideration of all who are interested in the continuing life of storytelling. From the point of view of literary criticism, the shifting tradition consists first and foremost only of literary works and not of a philosophy of literary form or of any ideas originating outside the realm of literature itself. The language which criticism uses to speak about the novel, for example, will derive from specific novels. At the same time it is engaged in selecting those very novels which will constitute its values. The language the critic uses to describe some kinds of fiction can seem absolute, when in actual fact it is simply the case that his language is suitable for describing one kind and is inappropriate to another.