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Questions of Identity on the Stevenson Trail in Scotland

dc.rights.licenseopenen_US
hal.structure.identifierLaboratoire Cultures, Éducation, Sociétés [LACES]
dc.contributor.authorGRAHAM, Lesley
IDREF: 203070453
dc.date.accessioned2024-04-15T09:28:29Z
dc.date.available2024-04-15T09:28:29Z
dc.date.issued2023
dc.identifier.isbn9781908980403en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://oskar-bordeaux.fr/handle/20.500.12278/197587
dc.description.abstractEnThis chapter sets out to explore questions of identity present in the travel accounts of a number of writers who, since the late nineteenth century, have visited Scotland on the trail of Robert Louis Stevenson. They include John Buchan, Clayton Hamilton, Nicholas Rankin, Gavin Bell, Hunter Davies, Michel Le Bris, and Ian Nimmo. These footsteps-travellers are generally eager to (re)visit the townscapes and landscapes familiar to Stevenson; to see for themselves any traces left behind by the author in the homes and museums with which his name is associated and to get to know first-hand places familiar from works such as Kidnapped, St Ives and Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, gathering ‘clues toward a proper understanding of the man and a judicious estimation of his work’.1 The main motivation underlying those objectives is, often quite explicitly, to establish a unique and personal connection with what W. E. Henley called Stevenson’s ‘spirit intense and rare’,2 a description reprised by at least one of the followers. Footsteps travel writing in general demonstrates a heightened awareness of the ways in which places and the character of their inhabitants change over the years, or, on the contrary, the ways in which landscapes and cultures have survived, bringing, as Christopher Keirstead points out, ‘an awareness of the layering of heritage and memory into sharp focus’.3 The accounts of these ‘travels in the footsteps of’ journeys often combine biographical, autobiographical and fictional experience, their narratives shuttling between present-day reality, Stevenson’s life story from childhood to adulthood, and his fiction. Time is often further layered in such a way that the authors interact with their multiple past selves, those selves that read Stevenson as children, or those selves that may have followed in Stevenson’s footsteps more than once, as is the case notably of Nimmo who followed in Stevenson’s footsteps first as an eighteen-year-old and later as 139 questions of identity on the stevenson trail in scotland an older adult.4 The accounts reveal the shifting identities – national and otherwise – not only of Robert Louis Stevenson and the writer following him, but also that of people encountered on the journey and of the fictional characters Stevenson created. The ‘endemic, obsessive re-enactment of previous quests’, as Steve Clark points out, epitomises much of what we now consider to be ‘postmodern’ travel writing.5 Similarly, the cultural sites and heritage trails that have been created to support these quests are, as Maria Lindgren Leavenworth remarks in her study of what she calls ‘second journeys’, ‘all features of postmodern culture in which distinctions between separate fields and between the modernist binary opposites (such as the distinction between past and present, between past reality and contemporary experience) have, to an extent, collapsed’.6 The accounts of these second journeys interact on many levels with Stevenson’s own texts which are often woven into the travelogue; with biographies of Stevenson, and with the texts left by each author’s travelling predecessors, often through quite extensive quotations. As Keirstead argues, ‘the need to remap this traveling doppelgänger through the authorial self invites a particularly close, intimate form of intertextuality —long understood to be one of travel writing’s defining attributes’.7 The most obvious intertextual encounter is the collision between biography and autobiography, the foliation or interleaving (sometimes materially in alternating chapters) of biographical and autobiographical observations, of the present journey and a past journey or journeys, and of fact and fiction. These encounters also demonstrate an awareness on the part of the travellerfollowers of the ways in which their texts and their journeys open up opportunities for an ongoing interaction between these different layers of experience. Stevenson’s Scottish places had been thoroughly mapped in a number of senses – culturally, historically, and cartographically – and his followers frequently highlight their awareness of those who have preceded them on the trail and acknowledge the ways in which previous subjectivities have depicted the reality of the terrain, although often simply in order to claim the originality of their own approach in comparison to any forerunners . They also often explicitly anticipate the use of their accounts as guidebooks by future footsteps-travellers.
dc.language.isoENen_US
dc.source.titleWriting Scottishness, Literature and the Shaping of Scottish National Identitiesen_US
dc.title.enQuestions of Identity on the Stevenson Trail in Scotland
dc.typeChapitre d'ouvrageen_US
dc.subject.halSciences de l'Homme et Société/Littératuresen_US
bordeaux.page138-156en_US
bordeaux.hal.laboratoriesLACES : Laboratoire Cultures – Éducation – Sociétés - EA 7437en_US
bordeaux.institutionUniversité de Bordeauxen_US
bordeaux.inpressnonen_US
hal.identifierhal-04546448
hal.version1
hal.date.transferred2024-04-15T09:28:32Z
hal.popularnonen_US
hal.audienceInternationaleen_US
hal.exporttrue
dc.rights.ccPas de Licence CCen_US
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