Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

Neoromanticism

Another literary trend of the end of the 19^th century was Neoromanticism.

Like aestheticists, neoromanticists protested against the severe and vulgar reality. However, while aestheticists concentrated their art on pure form, neoromanticists chose the world of adventure and cult of a strong man, opposing these to the routine of life. Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad are the representatives of the trend in English literature. They tried in various ways to restore the spirit of romance to the novel, in part by a choice of exotic places, in part by articulating their themes through plots of adventure and action.

Stevenson, Robert Louis Balfour (1850-1894), Scottish novelist, essayist, and poet, who contributed several classic works to children's literature. Born in Edinburgh, Stevenson studied engineering and then law at the University of Edinburgh. Since childhood, however, Stevenson's natural inclination had been toward literature, and he eventually started writing seriously.

Stevenson suffered from tuberculosis and often traveled in search of warm climates to ease his illness. His earliest works are descriptions of his journeys In 1879 he traveled to California, where in 1880 he married Frances Osbourne, an American divorcee. They returned to Europe in 1880 but moved to Saranac Lake, New York, in 1887. In 1888 they sailed from San Francisco on a cruise across the South Pacific. They settled in Samoa in 1889 in a final effort to restore Stevenson's health, but he died there five years later.

Stevenson's popularity is based primarily on the exciting subject matter of his adventure novels and fantasy stories. Treasure Island (1883) is a story of a search for buried gold involving the boy hero Jim Hawkins and the evil pirates Pew and Long John Silver. In the horror story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), the extremes of good and evil appear startlingly in one character when the physician Henry Jekyll discovers a drug that changes him, first at will and later involuntarily, into the monster Hyde. Kidnapped (1886) tells about the adventures of young David Balfour and the proud outlaw Alan Breck. Stevenson's other adventure stories include The Black Arrow (1888) and The Master of Ballantrae (1889).

Stevenson wrote skillfully in a variety of genres. He employed the forms of short stories, essay and literary criticism. He also has travel and autobiographical pieces and he wrote poetry for children.

Stevenson is praised as a writer of originality and power, whose novels are either brilliant adventure stories with subtle moral overtones or original and impressive presentations of human action in terms of history and topography as well as psychology; whose short stories produce some new and effective play in the relation between romance and irony or manage to combine horror and suspense with moral diagnosis; whose poems, though not showing the highest poetic genius, are often skillful, interesting and original, and sometimes valuable for their exhibition of a special kind of sensibility.

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