What is it about?
How did the toy theatres of Stevenson's childhood games and the emblem books of his religious upbringing influence his late Pacific fiction, The Ebb-Tide (1894)? This analysis uncovers a series of anti-realistic stylistic practices that link Stevenson's most advanced experiment in narrative fiction with his earliest experiences of the arts of storytelling.
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Why is it important?
The analysis shows that in The Ebb-Tide (1894) Stevenson staged a dialectic between naturalism and symbolism, which anticipated by twenty-two years the similar dialectic presented by James Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). As the latter is widely considered a foundational achievement in the development of literary modernism, this essay argues that Stevenson's proto-Modernism must be more seriously acknowledged.
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This page is a summary of: Turning The Ebb-Tide: Ghosts in the Machine, December 2024, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004682177_009.
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