'Home is the sailor, home from sea': Robert Louis Stevenson and the end of wandering

Zlosnik, Sue (2004) 'Home is the sailor, home from sea': Robert Louis Stevenson and the end of wandering. Yearbook of English studies, 34 (1). 240-252.. ISSN 0306-2473

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Abstract

This essay considers Stevenson's travel writings in relation to his Gothic imagination. In the early essays, An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, a process of authorial self-construction is at work that anticipates the modern self of his Gothic fiction. His United States travelogue, The Amateur Emigrant, often dwells on the abject in his descriptions of himself and his fellow passengers. In In the South Seas he engages with a culture that still possesses an epistemology relegated in Western culture to the post-enlightenment fears and anxieties that found clearest and most dramatic expression in Gothic fiction