These last three classes are jeered at by H. Forster's Howard's End (1910) who causes the Schlegel sisters to gently groan when he enthusiastically asks 'have you ever read Stevenson's Prince Otto?') (2) the product of the conventional imperial education system (like Dr Veraswami in Orwell's Burmese Days who has Stevenson's essays but has never read Ibsen) (3) the female academic the bibliophile and the juvenile. (1) To make matters worse, Stevenson was popular with the very people that the new educated elite wished to differentiate themselves from: the self-educated reader (like the poor clerk Leonard Bast in E.M. Stevenson's works, in contrast, had the disadvantage of apparently providing simple reading pleasure, of not seeming to require further analysis-in any case, they were texts that the new professional critics could not interpret and analyse in the accepted way. This endeavour also coincided with the establishment of university-based literary criticism, which understandably found greatest value in works whose appreciation required the greatest amount of critical training.
This remarkable parabola is undoubtedly connected to the attempt by Modernist writers-in the face of growing literacy and a threateningly powerful market in popular narratives-to define the serious artistic novel, the novel destined for an elite and educated readership. The story of Robert Louis Stevenson's reception is a fascinating episode in literary history: one of the most famous and praised writers in the world (whose death was followed by pilgrimages to his distant grave by writers such as Marcel Schwob in 1902, Jack London in 1908 and Rupert Brooke in 1913), he was then rejected by critics after the First World War and virtually excluded from the literary canon until the end of the twentieth century. STEVENSON AMONG ENGLISH-SPEAKING READERS AND CRITICS For this reason, I will start with a brief survey of this latter, and partly contrasting, story. This essay will consider the critical and popular reception of Robert Louis Stevenson's works in Italy: a story interesting in its own right and also of for the light it throws on the unusual history of Stevenson's reception in English-speaking countries.
0 kommentar(er)
