Robert Louis Stevenson and Nineteenth-Century French Literature

This book studies how Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about France, how he interpreted French literature, how he incorporated French into his writing, and how and why the earliest French critics translated, disseminated and interpreted his work. It does so in the context of debates surrounding the development of the novel at the end of the nineteenth century. The book aims to show that artistic debates taking place in France around Realism, Naturalism and Decadence influenced Stevenson’s theory and practice of the novel. It also shows that because of his generic and stylistic innovation, French authors and critics seeking to renew the novel held Stevenson’s writing up as a model of the literary future because it offered a way out of a perceived Naturalist impasse.