![]() ![]() This concept of adventure permits us to examine the reception of the works of Stevenson, and those of Conrad, in the literary culture specific to France at the beginning of the twentieth century. This literary encounter is the starting point for a discussion which continued into the 1900s in the literary reviews, where critics led by André Gide begin to develop a theory of the roman d’aventures. ![]() In the face of the this “crisis of the novel”, Marcel Schwob was to find, in Robert Louis Stevenson, the author who seemed to give form, in his fiction, to a novel of adventure which transcended the stale oppositions which had fed the debate on the future of the novel in France. In France, at the turn of the twentieth century, literary critics were seeking an alternative in foreign fiction to the moribund novel that they had inherited. Both authors had to situate themselves in relation to the literary debates of their era, and the soon-to-end dominance of realism. Joseph Conrad, in his adventurous fiction, responds to this problematizing of the conventions of the genre. These texts represent both the high-point of the genre, and its rewriting and subversion. The English adventure novel of the nineteenth century, descending from a tradition shaped by the writings of Defoe, Scott, and Dumas, was to find its masterpieces in Tresaure Island and Kidnapped! by Robert Louis Stevenson. ![]()
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