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The thesis provides a scholarly introduction to most of Robert Louis Stevenson's short stories: New Arabian Nights, More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, The Merry Men and Other Tales, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Island Nights' Entertainments, 'When the Devil was Well,' 'The Body-Snatcher,' 'The Misadventures of John Nicholson' and 'The Tale of Tod Lapraik' from the novel Catriona. The approach here is contextual: the discussions of each story draw on Stevenson's essays and other writings, and remark on some of the more significant literary or historical sources of which Stevenson had made use. The earlier versions (including manuscripts or manuscript fragments) of certain stories are also remarked on, in order to provide a fuller understanding of that story's development over a period of time. Five appendices are included, tabulating in detail the differences between the earlier versions and the final published versions of these stories. These introductory remarks are also directed towards providing a particular reading of the short stories. This reading begins by drawing attention to the neglected 'new' Arabian Nights, French and South Pacific stories, and refers to them as 'romantically comic.' It then suggests that, with endings characterised by reconciliation and resolution, these stories present an essentially 'restorative' or 'remedial' process: it is this process that allows these stories to be defined as 'romantically comic.' The term 'remedial' has significant implications: in these stories a character may literally be 'healed' or 'restored,' and the setting itself (for example, the forest of Fontainebleau in 'The Treasure of Franchard') may possess 'healing' properties. The thesis examines the implications of this comic 'remedial' process, and shows how it operates in and controls the outcome of these stories. By contrast, a number of these stories are not at all 'romantically comic.' Stories such as 'The Body-Snatcher' or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde present a process that is by no means 'remedial' or 'restorative': instead, an opposite process of decline or 'deterioration' is traced where, now, a character may literally lose his health. These gloomier and more tragic stories examine the 'symptoms' of such a 'deteriorated' condition: premature ageing, the sleepless night, the nightmare or the feverish dream, the dependance upon and enslavement to drugs or 'powders,' and so on. The thesis thus classifies two essentially opposite kinds of short story: the 'romantically comic,' with its 'restorative' ending and its 'remedial' process, perhaps literally representing the recovery of a character's health; and the gloomier 'tales for winter nights' which, by contrast, present a process of 'deterioration' where, for various reasons, a character's health is lost and is never finally recovered. The thesis implies a connection between these two processes, operating throughout the short stories, and Stevenson's own condition as an invalid (with its connotations of 'deteriorating' health) and a convalescent (with its opposite connotations of recovery). Indeed, for Stevenson, the act of writing stories is itself significant in this context.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1971. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Leland B. Jacobs. Dissertation Committee: Maxine Greene. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2009. / English Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (D.M.A.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Discography: leaf 129. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-128). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

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If the Victorians privileged the idea of ‘the family’ and the domestic configuration, what, then, was the position of unrelated groups, quasi-families and outsiders? While mid-Victorian literature widely praised or denigrated the reputation of the family, Stevenson’s works take a different standpoint. Throughout Stevenson’s oeuvre we encounter families which are falling apart and unrelated, family-like groups which take their place: Stevenson’s writing features clubs, clans and secret societies. Recent Stevenson criticism associates the problematic family relations depicted in his texts with biographical details, such as the tempestuous relationship the writer had with his father. Yet this thesis offers a reassessment of the kinship relations in Stevenson’s works. It argues that Stevenson’s writing does not focus on domestic quarrels, but prioritises families which are not related. It asks what it means to be a member of a family which is not familial or a non-family group which is like a family. Is it possible to be both a member of a family and to be without kin? Stevenson’s works are characterised by strange and estranged family groups; it is by stepping outside of the Victorian family that characters in Stevenson’s works experience the familial. The chapters in this thesis survey a range of social groups in Stevenson’s works, all of which take on a quasi-familial form. The first chapter considers the fin-de-siècle writing world and Stevenson’s own position in London’s family-like clubland relations, which both rejected and replicated the family form. The following two chapters go on to explore the role of exile and outsiders in kinship groups. Chapter 2 looks at David Balfour’s extra-familial adventures in Kidnapped and the clan groups he encounters. The importance of the outsider to kinship is proposed in Chapter 3, which considers island communities in Stevenson’s South Pacific writings and the role of taboo as a method of social organisation. The final two chapters consider the appropriation of familial relations by the secret society. In Chapter 4 we encounter the Otherness between the brothers in The Master of Ballantrae and the similar relations of inequality in the Fenian Brotherhood in The Dynamiter; here, fraternal relations have been adopted by the political secret society. Chapter 5 explores this relationship between family and secret society in The Dynamiter further: it considers the female characters in the text and the crossovers and exchanges between domestic family life and political fraternity. These familial groups are characterised by difference, Otherness and exclusion; Stevenson’s works reconsider family relations and recognise the strangeness of social groups.

This thesis deals with three writers, George Gissing, Edmund Gosse and Robert Louis Stevenson. I use the words "introversion" and "extroversion" partly in a geographical sense. George Gissing, for example, in spite of Continental influences remained a very English (in some ways almost insular) novelist, and in that sense an introvert. Edmund Gosse, on the other hand, was a very cosmopolitan critic although his style was typically English. Robert Louis Stevenson provides a third angle. Having been born in Edinburgh he was forced into exile for most of his life, and obviously this had a great effect on his writings. Of the three writers most weight is given to Edmund Gosse. In my analysis of George Gissing I concentrate on some of his best known novels, The Unclassed, The Nether World, New Grub Street and Born in Exile. The Emancipated and By the Ionian Sea deal specifically with Italy. There are four chapters on Edmund Gosse. The first concentrates on the early part of his long career when his main interest was Scandinavian literature. The next two chapters give an account of his impressions of and writings on America and France. In the fourth chapter on Edmund Gosse I concentrate on the part of his career when he had become an established authority on his own country's literature. Robert Louis Stevenson, too, is dealt with in four chapters. First I write briefly about his Scottish works, all inspired by his childhood and youth. Next I deal with his two favourite countries, France and the United States, both associated with his Wife, Fanny. The last chapter follows Stevenson to the South Seas where he spent the last few years of his life and wrote some of his best books. The three writers are compared from time to time. Robert Louis Stevenson and Edmund Gosse knew each other well; George Gissing is the odd man out. But his reaction to foreign influences differs from that of the other two and this makes a comparison very interesting.

Thesis (doctoral)--Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux III. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 536-[549]).

This thesis provides a wide-ranging account of the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, tracing an unyielding preoccupation with the mode of romance throughout his famously diverse body of writing. It argues that Stevenson's prose retools romance in several important ways; these include modernization, disenchantment, and the reinterpretation of romance as a practical force able to reach beyond textual confines in order to carve out long-lasting psychological pathways in a reader. In its pursuit of these arguments, the thesis draws upon and appends a significant amount of archival material never before used, including excerpts from The Hair Trunk – Stevenson's first extended piece of fiction, still unpublished in English. More widely, it analyses the appearance of romance within four major aspects of Stevenson's prose: aesthetic theme, structure, setting, and heroism, each of which is the focus of a discrete chapter. The introduction engages with the history and definition of romance itself, arguing that it is most usefully approached as mode rather than genre in the context of Stevenson's writing. Chapter I then assesses Stevenson's direct critical engagement with romance, and appraises his wider literary aesthetic in that light. Romance is shown to be built in to the way he writes about writing, adventure being intrinsic to his authorial quest for adequate expression. Chapter II goes on to examine Stevenson's relationship with structure, and argues that self-reflexivity interacts with romance to form the habitual core of his creative writing. Chapter III investigates the use of cities, forests and seas as sites of modern romance within Stevenson's oeuvre, arguing that he eschews descriptive Romanticism and instead lauds a primarily practical approach towards the navigation of these environments. Finally, Chapter IV demonstrates Stevenson's perception of a relationship between authorship and the heroic, charting his use of romance as part of a progressive evocation of the failure of heroism itself as a sustainable modern ideal.