South Sea Tales

The literary world was shocked when in 1889, at the height of his career, Robert Louis Stevenson announced his intention to settle permanently on the Pacific island of Samoa. His readers were equally shocked when he began to use the subject material offered by his new environment, not to promote a romance of empire, but to produce some of the most ironic and critical treatments of imperialism in nineteenth-century fiction. Stevenson emerges as a witness both to the cross-cultural encounters of nineteenth-century imperialism and to the creation of the global culture which characterizes the post-colonial world. Contains: The Beach of Falesá; The Bottle Imp; The Isle of Voices; The Ebb-Tide; A Trio and Quartette; The Cart-Horses and the Saddle-Horse; Something In It.