Bloom's Modern Critical Views - Robert Louis Stevenson (2005) (341p) [Inua].pdf

Title: Robert Louis Stevenson (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Editor: Harold Bloom
Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Hardcover: 332 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L) (October 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791081281
ISBN-13: 978-0791081280

Description:
Robert Louis Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, the essayist, poet, and author of fiction and travel books, known especially for his novels of adventure. Many of Stevenson's stories are set in colourful locations, they also have horror and supernatural elements. His most famous being The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).

Editor’s Note:
My introduction attempts an evaluative overview of Robert Louis Stevenson, drawing some of its material from his letters, while touching upon such varied achievements as his short fiction, his poetry, and his major novelistic romance, The Master of Ballantrae.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, sublimely Falstaffian poet-critic-prose romancer and Catholic polemicist, surveys Stevenson’s style, acutely finding in it “a sort of fastidiousness that has still something of the fighting spirit”.
The late Leslie Fiedler centers upon Stevenson’s lifelong Jekyll-Hyde split, which he sees as culminating in The Master of Ballantrae, while Robert Kiely emphasizes the writer’s retention of a child’s imagination. Douglas Gifford then shows the place of The Master of Ballantrae in the history of Scottish fiction.
The unfinished Weir of Hermiston is analyzed by K.G. Simpson, while William Veeder interprets Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a hidden study in the resentment of patriarchy.
Henry James and Stevenson are juxtaposed by George Dekker, after which Stephen Arata confronts Jekyll and Hyde as a “dissociation of writing from selfhood”, and Alan Sandison provides a very useful account of Treasure Island.
The poet-critic John Hollander movingly illuminates A Child’s Garden of Verses, while Vanessa Smith concludes this volume by a incisive analysis of Stevenson’s tales of “the island world of the Pacific”.