Edinburgh Companion to RLS published this month

Later this month, the Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson will be published, edited by Penny Fielding, one of the General Editors of the New Edinburgh Edition. This wide-ranging collection of essays is the first to set Stevenson in detailed social, political and literary contexts, taking account of both Stevenson’s extraordinary thematic and generic diversity and his geographical range. The chapters explore his relation to late-19th-century publishing, psychology, travel, the colonial world and the emergence of modernism in prose and poetry. Through the pivotal figure of Stevenson, the collection explores how literary publishing and cultural life changed across the second half of the 19th century. Stevenson emerges as a complex writer, author both of hugely popular boys’ stories and of seminally important adult novels, as well as the literary figure who debated with Henry James the theory of fiction and the nature of realism. The collection shows how interest in the unconscious and changes in the conception of childhood demand that we re-evaluate our ideas of his writing. Individual essays by international experts trace Stevenson’s literary contexts from Scotland to the South Pacific, and show him to be one of the key writers for understanding the growing sense of globalisation and cultural heterogeneity in the late 19th century.

Welcome to the EdRLS Blog

Welcome to the blog for the New Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (EdRLS), published by Edinburgh University Press. The project commenced in 2009 and is due to complete in 2020, and will see the publication of 39 volumes of newly edited texts, which will be augmented by an electronic edition. You can find out more about EdRLS by visiting the About the Edition page.

Much of the work being undertaken for EdRLS intrinsically draws on today’s electronic technologies—from digitizing the source texts to preparing the final volumes for publication in both printed and electronic formats; from collaborative filesharing on the Cloud to online discussions and virtual editorial meetings via Skype—so, it made absolute sense to publicize the project and its findings in a similar way.

Hence, this blog, which will act as a primary source of news, information and resources relating to the edition for volume editors, project personnel, researchers and the general public. As well as providing these kinds of overviews, we will also be posting more reflective items that relate to our experiences in preparing the edition, working with archives and the implications of our efforts for the scholarly editing.

Watch this space—and comments are always welcome!