The South Pacific narratives of Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London

race, class, imperialism

The South Pacific narratives of Robert Louis ...
Lawrence Phillips, Lawrence Ph ...
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April 30, 2025 | History

The South Pacific narratives of Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London

race, class, imperialism

From 1888 to 1915 Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London were uniquely placed to witness and record the imperial struggle for the South Pacific. Engaging the major European colonial empires and the USA, the struggle questioned ideas of liberty, racial identity and class like few other arenas of the time. Exploring a unique moment in South Pacific and Western history through the work of Stevenson and London, this study assesses the impact of their national identities on works like The Amateur Emigrant and Adventure; discusses their attitudes towards colonialism, race and class; shows how they negotiated different cultures and peoples in their writing and considers where both writers are placed in the Western tradition of writing about the Pacific. By contextualizing Stevenson's and London's South Pacific work, this study reveals two critical voices of late nineteenth-century and early 20th-century colonialism that deserve to stand beside their contemporary Joseph Conrad in shaping contemporary attitudes towards imperialism, race, and class.

Publish Date
Publisher
Continuum
Language
English
Pages
218

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Book Details


Table of Contents

'Race', class and imperialism in Stevenson's The amateur emigrant
Jack London's The people of the abyss: socialism, imperialism and the bourgeois ethnographer
Death, disease and paradise: a parable of imperial expansion
The inequities of trade: adventure narratives, ethics, and imperial commerce in Robert Louis Stevenson's The wrecker
The indignity of labour: Jack London's adventure and plantation labour in the Solomon Islands
Fragments of empire, fractured identities.

Edition Notes

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Published in
New York
Series
Continuum literary studies

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
823/.809
Library of Congress
PR5496 .P48 2012, PR5496.P48 2012

The Physical Object

Pagination
p. cm.
Number of pages
218

Edition Identifiers

Open Library
OL25223576M
ISBN 13
9781441199560, 9781441199287, 9781441173386
LCCN
2012005163
OCLC/WorldCat
777652874, 1138651012
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.5040/9781474211536

Work Identifiers

Work ID
OL16531996W

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