Imperial glory unlock all nations5/6/2023 In the face of the this “crisis of the novel”, Marcel Schwob was to find, in Robert Louis Stevenson, the author who seemed to give form, in his fiction, to a novel of adventure which transcended the stale oppositions which had fed the debate on the future of the novel in France. In France, at the turn of the twentieth century, literary critics were seeking an alternative in foreign fiction to the moribund novel that they had inherited. Both authors had to situate themselves in relation to the literary debates of their era, and the soon-to-end dominance of realism. Joseph Conrad, in his adventurous fiction, responds to this problematizing of the conventions of the genre. These texts represent both the high-point of the genre, and its rewriting and subversion. The English adventure novel of the nineteenth century, descending from a tradition shaped by the writings of Defoe, Scott, and Dumas, was to find its masterpieces in Tresaure Island and Kidnapped! by Robert Louis Stevenson. For Conrad, the period dealt with is longer, extending from his earliest notices in the French literary reviews in the late 1890s to the assessments of his work that appeared at the time of his death. For Stevenson, this period extends from the late 1880s, when the first translations of his work appeared, to the mid 1900s, when his reputation became bound up in the theories of the roman d’aventure dealt with in the previous section. Finally, a third section will deal with the evolving French critical response to Stevenson and Conrad, attempting to capture a representative selection of the critics’ responses to their work. Conrad’s own interaction with his literary reputation in France through his negotiation of translations of his work will also be dealt with, where, in Stevenson’s case, there is not scope for such investigation, as he died before translation of his work really took off. The development of the idea of the roman d’aventure is traced here, providing a through-line from Schwob to Gide, and then considering Gide as a crucial link between Stevenson and Conrad. Following that, a second section will consider the two authors in relation to their most influential French critics, Marcel Schwob and André Gide. Attention will also be paid to their own reading of themselves into the established conventions of adventure fiction, and their attitudes to the mass market and popularity, or writing as an economic activity. The first section will therefore deal with setting the scene, and providing a historical backdrop for consideration of Conrad and Stevenson as writers of adventure novels, considering the growth of the genre as a specifically nineteenth century phenomenon, and how we might situate the two writers in relation to this context. It provides us with a way in to an in-depth study of their interactions with their French contemporaries. The two interlocking contentions dealt with are that, first, Conrad and Stevenson are best understood in relation to each other through the lens of adventure fiction, and, second, that the impact of the debate centred around le roman d’aventure in France is the bridge between the French critical reception of Stevenson and that of Conrad. As Michel Le Bris wonders, “comment a-t-on pu oublier que c’est à travers la lecture de Stevenson, puis de Conrad, et du débat qui s’ensuivit jusque vers le milieu des années trente, que le roman français s’est, pour l’essentiel, renouvelé ?” Whether this is indeed the case is one of the questions central to this study.
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