“History, Criticism, Theory, and the Strange Case of Joseph Conrad and R. L. Stevenson”

At the outset of his writing career, Joseph Conrad envisioned a horizon of expectations for his works and in so doing sought ways to reach out to the British public by combining literary ambitions and the adoption of the popular narrative forms available in the literary market. In this fundamentally dialogic attempt, the present essay argues, he found models and inspiration in the corpus of writing created by the supreme late-Victorian manipulator and creator of sub-genres: Robert Louis Stevenson, his ‘secret sharer.’ The essay then foregrounds Stevenson within the late-Victorian canon and demonstrates his proximity to Conrad both historically and in terms of his aspirations for his fiction. In questioning the validity of the modernist canon, finally, it argues that both authors cross artificially imposed literary boundaries.