‘Out of my country and myself I go’: Identity and Writing in Stevenson’s Early Travel Books

Abstract

Believes Stevenson’s neglected early travel works offer valuable insights into his identity as a writer. Demonstrates how his journeys in France and Belgium allowed him to escape temporarily the cultural constraints of home and use this estrangement to experiment with new forms of selfhood; his journeys were propitious occasions for writing, because in this work he inscribed himself thereby in mobile, aleatory narratives. Argues his journeys and his writing were dispassionate adventures that accepted the instability of world and self, opening a space in which he could imagine that both were new again. Claims Stevenson knew this sense of originality might be illusory, but preferred his illusion because it permitted him to write.