Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration

Explores Robert Louis Stevenson’s collaborative process Contains new readings of thirteen works by Robert Louis Stevenson, including several rarely discussedSheds light on connections between authorship, celebrity, the literary marketplace and the creative processSupported by extensive manuscript research This book investigates Stevenson’s literary collaborations with family and friends as he travelled Scotland, America and the Pacific. With critical readings of both major and minor Stevenson texts, supported and contextualised by unpublished manuscripts and letters by both Stevenson and those he wrote with, this book argues that Stevenson’s writings are both a product of and a meditation on collaborative writing. Stevenson’s self-reflective body of work reimagines late-Victorian authorship by examining the ways that authors choose material, negotiate the marketplace and, ultimately, maintain power over their own words, or let that power go.