Strange Case of Robert Louis Stevenson and 'Tusitala': Ethnography and the Politics of Genre

我的博士学位将专注于罗伯特·路易斯·史蒂文森作品中的流派政治，并解决普遍存在的批评倾向，即将他的前太平洋和太平洋地区的作品视为具有不同政治议程和风格的独立项目。它将认识到，不仅可以通过太平洋文本，也可以通过史蒂文森更著名的早期著作，通过确定新兴的理解文化和种族差异的“科学”模式的影响，如民族志和比较人类学，来追溯一致的“民族志关注”。它将探索这种方法所固有的隐含的、往往是颠覆性的政治如何允许重新评估史蒂文森早期写作中的体裁，以及更广泛的Fin-de-siècle的体裁。此外，它还将探讨太平洋如何在史蒂文森作品的体裁转变中发挥重要作用，并探讨太平洋如何影响后来的作品，而不仅仅是民族志。我的项目将寻求在人类学、文学和遗产之间建立新的联系，并通过探索文学在殖民遭遇中的作用，探索文学在太平洋文化文物漂洋过海到西方博物馆中的作用，以及探索文学(例如，史蒂文森的太平洋民俗故事，重点关注当地文物和精神习俗)如何描述性地展示非西方物体，而不是字面上的。

My PhD will focus on the politics of genre in Robert Louis Stevenson's writing and address the prevailing critical tendency to view his pre-Pacific and Pacific work as discrete projects with separate political agendas and styles. It will recognise that a consistent 'ethnographic concern' can be traced not only through the Pacific texts but also through Stevenson's earlier, better known writing, by identifying the influence of emerging 'scientific' modes of understanding cultural and racial difference such as ethnography and comparative anthropology. It will explore how the implicit, often subversive, politics that were inherent to this approach allow for a re-evaluation of genre in Stevenson's early writing, and more broadly of genre at the fin-de-siècle. Furthermore, it will explore how the Pacific plays a vital role in the transformation of genre across Stevenson's writing, and look at how the Pacific influences the later works beyond merely the ethnographic. My project will seek to establish new connections between anthropology, literature and heritage and to present these in public facing ways by exploring the role of literature in colonial encounters that saw Pacific cultural artefacts traverse across the sea to Western museums - as well as explore how literature (for instance, Stevenson's Pacific folklore tales which focus on local artefacts and spiritual customs) display non-Western objects descriptively rather than literally.