Stevenson and the Art of Fiction

Abstract

In a cluster of essays written during the 1880s, Stevenson explored — and celebrated — the persistence of precivilized states of consciousness in the modern world, in the guise of romance, oral narratives, childhood make-believe, and the literary imagination. These essays, which appeared in popular journals and enjoyed a wide readership, mark Stevenson’s engagement with the emergent evolutionist approach to literature. A new school of psychologists, following Herbert Spencer, examined the imagination as a connection between modern individuals and humanity’s collective past. The psychologist James Sully and others used an evolutionary model of the mind to explore the affinity between dreaming, myth-making, and literary inspiration. An increasing interest in the unconscious mind also informed the writings of psychical researchers including F. W. H. Myers and the new sciences of comparative mythology and physiological aesthetics, as practised by Andrew Lang and Grant Allen. Similarly, contemporary writers often expressed evolutionist understandings of creativity: for Kipling, the artist’s imagination represented his memory of past lives and, for Wilde, ’concentrated race-experience’.1