Stevenson's fiction is evaluated in the light of the significant Romantic traditions that have influenced the novel and the romance. Stevenson is also considered as a serious writer and compared with Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, and other major writers of the period. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In this fascinating book, Reid examines Robert Louis Stevenson's writings in the context of late-Victorian evolutionist thought, arguing that an interest in 'primitive' life is at the heart of his work. She investigates a wide range of Stevenson's writing, including Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Treasure Island as well as previously unpublished material from the Stevenson archive at Yale. Reid's interpretation offers a new way of understanding the relationship between his Scottish and South Seas work. Her analysis of Stevenson's engagement with anthropological and psychological debate also illuminates the dynamic intersections between literature and science at the fin de siècle.

Jason Marc Harris's ambitious book argues that the tensions between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment values produce the literary fantastic. Demonstrating that a negotiation with folklore was central to the canon of British literature, he explicates the complicated rhetoric associated with folkloric fiction. His analysis includes a wide range of writers, including James Barrie, William Carleton, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Neil Gunn, George MacDonald, William Sharp, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Hogg. These authors, Harris suggests, used folklore to articulate profound cultural ambivalence towards issues of class, domesticity, education, gender, imperialism, nationalism, race, politics, religion, and metaphysics. Harris's analysis of the function of folk metaphysics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives reveals the ideological agendas of the appropriation of folklore and the artistic potential of superstition in both folkloric and literary contexts of the supernatural.