“The Miracle: Robert Louis Stevenson’s position in the history of European literature”

With Treasure Island, and its theoretical companion pieces “A Gossip on Romance” and “A Humble Remonstrance”, the present essay argues, Stevenson came to occupy a strategic position in the history of the novel tout court; What happened in the cottage at Pitlochry in 1881 when he started writing his boys’ story can be said to have achieved three things: it marked the inversion of a gradual de-literarisation of the most fundamental of narrative forms—adventure—which from the first century BCE until the mid eighteenth century had been coterminous with prose literature; it inaugurated the Golden Age of the adventure novel in English, providing the necessary literary environment for writers like Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad; and it also inspired a new generation of European writers at the beginning of the twentieth century.