Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson - William H. Hardesty, III and David D. Mann (essay date 1982)


Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson - William H. Hardesty, III and David D. Mann (essay date 1982)

William H. Hardesty, III and David D. Mann (essay date 1982)

SOURCE: "Stevenson's Method in Treasure Island: The Old Romance, Retold," in Essays in Literature, Vol. IX, No. 2, Fall, 1982, pp. 180-93.

Bell suggests that Treasure Island reflects aspects of Stevenson's own life:

[Stevenson] brought so much of himself to Treasure Island, it is hard to speak of the book except in terms of his life. The story's movement chimes with his own existence. Its first chapters are all upheaval and departure, a setting forth in a year left unidentified to a place unknown. Personality, as Robert Kiely [in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure, 1964] has written, is equally dispensable: it barely figures "except as a costume or disguise which may be put on and off at will." The hero is fatherless, his friends strip themselves eagerly of their accustomed roles in life; the villains...

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