South Sea Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

By Robert Louis Stevenson

Book Overview

The literary world was shocked when in 1889, at the height of his career, Robert Louis Stevenson announced his intention to settle permanently on the Pacific island of Samoa. His readers were equally shocked when he began to use the subject material offered by his new environment, not to promote a romance of empire, but to produce some of the most ironic and critical treatments of imperialism in 19th-century fiction."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192837001
• ISBN13: 9780192837004
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.6" x 0.7" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

Robert Louis Stevenson will be allways considered one of the best novelists of the world

I'm read "Treasure Island" at my childhood, when I were eight years old. As I'ma writing a book named "Real and imginaries islands", focusing 20 famous islands mentioned at the Universal literature, the island of Stevenson is the first commented in my book. A new reading gave me the chance to meet again Long John Silver with his parrot "Captain Flint" and Jim Hawkins. The mature man and the child were once more next, and I' had a great plesure to read again this novel. Sighting the cronology of Robert Louis Stevenson, I see that there is 120 years from his depart from San Francisco, California, aboard the "Casco", for the South Seas. And i can affirm that "In the South Seas" is a marvellous description of this part of the world. The "South Sea Tales", assembling "The Beach of Falesa", "Thee Bottle IMP", "The Isle of Voices" and "The Ebb-Tide" is a beautiful book and in it, the author has denoucen the action of europeans and north-americans at the South Seas as a disastrous interfering on the culture of the native peoples of the islands of Pacific Ocean, with the goal to domaine them and to take their lands. The courageous words of Robert Louis Stevenson denouncing the merchants and the missionaries as factors to serve the economic interests of Europa ean North America shows as R.L. Stevenson were capable to see the real motifs of their presence at that region. The reading of "South Sea Tales" give us the chance to underatand the right History of the Pacific. It's a pleasure to read "South Sea Tales".

Some enjoyable South Pacific yarns

I don't know why no one has reviewed this volume before. It is a good readable edition of several of Stevenson's South Sea stories, including the rarely encountered novel The Ebb Tide. The introduction is interesting enough, and the footnotes are very helpful for expressions in the Beach-la-Mar pidgin dialect and nautical terms. This is Stevenson's most mature fiction and is a far cry from Kidnapped and the Child's Garden of Verses.

Attention all students of literature!

It wasn't until I had nearly reached the last page of The Wrecker that I realized R.L. Stevenson meant for the book to read as slowly as it did. Though there were sections of high drama, I had struggled with the pace to that point, viewing it as a bit staid or wordy, much more so than other works of his I had read.In the end, though, I could clearly see his clever intentions. Stevenson's "Tell-Tale" clues indicated that The Wrecker was a response to the jerking, backwards plots of the modern mystery story. Stevenson intentionally slowed the narrative speed, blunted the sharp edges (in contrast to Poe's hard-hitting, most famous stories), and added descriptive eloquence, sometimes blatantly disconnecting it from the plot (in a mixed tribute to Dickens, perhaps). He took the reversed chronology of a murder mystery, and flipped it backwards one more time.The Wrecker will not be a bestseller in 2000. Nor should it be. It is a masterpiece, however, and will present a remarkable view of the evolution of the modern novel from inside the mind of one of its architects to any student of literature who takes time out to read it.