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The Poetics Of Talk In Robert Louis Stevenson’S Treasure Island, Amy Wong
The Poetics Of Talk In Robert Louis Stevenson’S Treasure Island, Amy Wong
Amy Wong
This essay considers the relationship between Robert Louis Stevenson’s well-loved adventure classic Treasure Island and his philosophical commitments to talk. For Stevenson, talking and adventuring share an experiential poetics that emphasizes responsiveness to unpredictable interactions. By examining several of Stevenson’s prose pieces, including “Talk and Talkers” and “My First Book” as well as Treasure Island, this essay argues that the novel aspires to translate the poetics of talk into a print medium. Treasure Island imagines itself as a form of “living print,” a work that, like Long John Silver’s parrot, seems more dynamic than print typically is, yet is …
Arthur Conan Doyle's "Great New Adventure Story": Journalism In The Lost World, Amy Wong
Arthur Conan Doyle's "Great New Adventure Story": Journalism In The Lost World, Amy Wong
Amy Wong
This essay discusses the critical engagements of Arthur Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) with the rise of journalistic professionalism at the turn of the century. With a focus on features from the novel’s serial publication in George Newnes’s illustrated periodical, the Strand Magazine, this essay argues that this popular work of fiction self-consciously positions itself against what had become a fairly mainstream ideological and generic split between literature and journalism. Through its masquerade as a first-person account mediated by a professional network of journalists and editors, The Lost World integrates conventions of literary romance and objective journalism to combat …
Town-Talk And The Cause Célèbre Of Robert Browning’S The Ring And The Book, Amy R. Wong
Town-Talk And The Cause Célèbre Of Robert Browning’S The Ring And The Book, Amy R. Wong
Amy Wong
This essay examines Browning’s relentless preoccupation with generating such forms of “idle talk” in The Ring and the Book.3 For the most part, critics from the time of the poem’s initial publication to the present day have focused their energies on speakers directly involved in the case— Pompilia (on her deathbed), Guido, Caponsacchi—or the Pope, as he crafts his learned pronouncement.4 Those who have devoted attention to the first three town talkers, including scholars such as Mary Rose Sullivan and William E. Buckler, give accounts that tend to individualize these personae in ways that obscure the significance of …