Series:

The New Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

2 total works

Cover of Essays I

Essays I

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Published 31 October 2018
The first scholaraly edition of Stevenson's essays

These essays, written from 1874 to 1880, established 'R.L.S.' as one of the prominent young writers of his time, a provocative and philosophically inclined bohemian playfully offering advice to his post-Darwinian generation about how to find contentment in a society of rigid bourgeois demands. In this first ever scholarly edition, the 1881 text is followed by extensive explanatory notes and the story of the composition and reception of each essay. The volume opens with a full listing of all Stevenson's essays followed by a substantial introductory discussion of Stevenson's career as essayist, the characteristics and literary contexts of his essays, and the critical and popular reception of his essays from the 1870s to the present day. The volume Introduction proper then presents the publication history of Virginibus Puerisque, the reception of the book and notable characteristics of the collection taken as a whole: its style and shape, and the aesthetic and ethical vision it presents.

Key Features
  • Provides an introductory overview of Stevenson as essayist
  • Includes composition and publication history of each essay
  • Provides a publication history of the volume of collected essays
  • Includes notes identifying literary references, Stevenson's idiosyncratic diction, social and historical allusions and cross references to Stevenson's other works

Cover of Prince Otto, by Robert Louis Stevenson
This is a fast-moving tale of passion and politics. In Prince Otto, first published in serial form in 1885, Stevenson uses his genius for adventure and romance to explore some decidedly grown-up themes. The tiny 19th-century German state of Grunewald seems to be a principality of the world of fairy-tale. But its ruler is beset in public by the forces of modern politics, and troubled in private by an unhappy marriage. Ill-prepared to deal with either, Otto is forced to choose between them. This first fully edited edition of the novel will provoke readers to think again about the scope and purpose of Stevenson's brilliant story-telling. It explores the most modern of themes, the moral compromises required by marriage: a romance in which the marriage of the hero and the heroine is not the happy conclusion of the plot, but the problem that the plot has to resolve. It is a fascinating text for what it tells us about Stevenson's goals and aspirations at this crucial stage of his career, and about the changing nature of the novel in English at the end of the 19th-century.