Stevenson in French Literary History

This chapter analyses Stevenson’s place in the development of French literature and positions his work within debates taking place on the evolution of the novel in fin-de-siècle France. The importance of Stevenson’s fiction to the elaboration of the French adventure novel in the early twentieth century is well known. This chapter shows that even before this, Stevenson’s writing offered a counter-model to Naturalism. The chapter discusses how French critics were unconcerned with internal debates in the Anglo-Scottish literary field because they considered France as the arbiter of literary norms, and shows how Stevenson appealed to French critics because he rejected literary schools and forged his own path in terms of genre, form and style. The chapter is divided into three sections: ‘Generational Differences’; ‘Beyond Naturalism’; ‘Towards a New Novel’.