Den allerede moderne strand
Robert Louis Stevensons stillehavsfortællinger
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/kok.v48i130.123633Nøgleord:
Sydhavsstranden, R.L. Stevenson, realisme, allegori, modernisme, planetær, dekadenceResumé
Focusing on the beach’s function as a political and economic liminal zone of negotiation and transformation of identity, the article maps a specific temporal and spatial problem in relation to the beach as geographical and rhetorical topos. Contrary to the romantic invention of the European beach as a temporal refugium free of the metropolis’s modernity, Stevenson’s tales of stranded beachcombers on remote Pacific islands draw a surprising model of the beach as the source and scene of a post-imperialist simulation space based on speculation in risk. The modern and modernist disappointment of never finding the romantic beach translates into an endless search for the next and more distant beach, which at the same time is presented as historically primitive or not yet modern. In Stevenson’s tale this proleptic rhetoric is reversed: The beach is already modern and only more modern, the more distant from the metropolises it is.
The article begins by listing the all-dominant topos in the Pacific literature descriptions of the beach, building on and continuing the classic locus amoenus and the dream of the ultimate beach. Stevenson’s tales are a critique of this romantic formation of the classic topos. This deconstruction is analyzed in two narratives that articulate two different geographical and rhetorical topoi, linked to respectively realism and allegory as literary form. In the final section of the article, the beach is briefly discussed as a decadent place: In Stevenson’s tales, the beach is not a place of renaissance, but a place encompassed by the apocalypse, the impending doom of the earth, and the end of the placeness of all places.
Referencer
Andersen, Frits. ”Den planetære vending. En fremtid for sammenlignende litteraturforskning?” K&K 127 (2019): 51-71.
Boddy, Kasia: ”The Modern beach”. Critical Quarterly, 49 4 (Winter 2007): 21-39.
Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de. Voyage autour du monde. Red. Michel Bideaux og Sonia Faessel. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2001.
Colley, Ann C. Robert Louis Stevenson and the colonial imagination, Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Pub., 2004.
Colley, Ann C. ”Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Sea crossings”. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 48 4, (2008): 871-884.
Cook, J., Beaglehole, J.C. & Skelton, R.A. The Journals of Captain James Cook on his voyages of discovery. The Hakluyt Society at the Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1955-74.
Corbin, Alain. Le territoire du vide. L’Occident et le désir du rivage (1750-1840). Paris: Aubier Collection historique, 1988.
Curtius, E.R. European literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Dening, G. Beach crossings: voyaging across times, cultures, and self. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Elias, Amy J. og Christian Moraru (red.). The Planetary Turn. Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Northwestern UP, 2015.
Friedman, Susan S. Planetary Modernisms. Provocations on Modernity across Time. New York: Columbia UP, 2015.
Gillis, John R. The Human Shore. Seacoasts in History. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Jolly, R. Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: travel, empire, and the author’s profession, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.
Jolly, Roslyn. ”Stevenson’s ‘Sterling Domestic Fiction’: ‘The Beach of Falesá’”. The Review of English Studies 50 200 (1999): 463-483.
Lamb, Jonathan. ”Dancing and Romancing: The Obstacle of the Beach and the Threshold of the Past”. International Journal of Scottish Literature 9 (2013): 99-112.
Largaud-Ortéga, Sylvie. ”Shifting Identities in R.L. Stevenson’s Postcolonial Fiction”. International Journal of Scottish Literature 9 (2013): 85-98.
Morgan, Benjamin. ”Fin du Globe: On Decadent Planets”. Victorian Studies 58 4 (Summer 2016): 609-635.
O’Malley, Seamus. ”R. L. Stevenson’s ’The Beach of Falesá’ and the Conjuring-Tricks of Capital”. English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 57 1 (2014): 59-80.
Robertson, G. & Carrington, H. The Discovery of Tahiti. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1948.
Segalen, V. & Esponde, J. Les Marquises: «Journal des îles», extraits ; suivi de Cyclone dans les îles Tuamotou. Saint-Quentin-de-Caplong: Atelier de l’agneau, 2011.
Steer, Philip. ”Romances of Uneven Development: Spatiality, Trade, and Form in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Novels”. Victorian Literature and Culture (2015): 625-57.
Stevenson, R.L. & Osbourne, L. The Ebb-tide: a trio and quartette; The story of a lie. London: Heinemann, 1924.
Stevenson, R.L. & Osbourne, L. The Wrecker. London: Heinemann and Balestier, 1892.
Stevenson, R.L. Letters and miscellanies of Robert Louis Stevenson: In the South Seas: A foot-note to history. New York: Charles Scribner’s sons, 1905.
Stevenson, R.L., Booth, B.A. & Mehew, E. The letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994-95.
Treagus, Mandy. ”Crossing ‘The Beach’: Samoa, Stevenson and ‘The Beach of Falesá’”. Literature Compass (2014): 312-320.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974.
Weaver, Rachael. ”Ecologies of the Beachcomber in Colonial Australian Literature”. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (2015): 1-14.
Wells, H.G. The Time Machine and Other Works. London: Wordworth Editions, 2017.
Westphal, Bertrand. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Downloads
Publiceret
Citation/Eksport
Nummer
Sektion
Licens
Tidsskriftet følger dansk ophavsret.
