"Treasure Island" by R. L. Stevenson
A Game for Children and Adults
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21780087 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Natalia Bilyk (0009-0009-8531-7712, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Issue | 2(34) |
| Pages | 10-13 |
| Publication date | 2023-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Bulletin of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv Literary Studies Linguistics Folklore Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1728-2659 • E-ISSN: 2709-8494 |
| Publisher | Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (PUBLISHER • UA) |
| DOI | 10.17721/1728-2659.2023.34.02 |
| OpenAlex | W4385642144 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 3 |
"Treasure Island" by R. L. Stevenson is presented in the context of British Neo-Romanticism, that embodied masculine culture, characteristic of the late Victorian period, and produced a special type of "everyage" reader, as well as adventure literature addressed to him. "Treasure Island" is one of the first novels (romances), which were intentionally written both for children and for adults. Still, its reputation of the masterpiece of boyhood fiction may prevent readership from capturing "adults" implications, that primarily exist at the deepest levels of human consciousness and relate to the complicated nature of human character and behavior. The interrelation of "children" and "adults" layers unfolds in the playful discourse of the novel, discussed in the paper as a boyhood adventure, as a quest, or as an intertertextual game with its readers. Stevenson’s conception of a fictional world as the fusion of the imaginative and of the real, where the imaginative plays a leading role, is of the utmost importance for the topic of the paper. Pirate boyhood game is revealed on two levels: at the surface level, as an objective reality created in accordance with the codes of adventure literature, and at the deeper level, as an expression of a youthful desire for adventures and fulfillment of a boyish sea dream. The former is emphasized by explicit allusions to Ballantain’s "Coral Island", and the latter is prompted by not so visible allusions to Poe’s "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym". The plot of the novel is designed as a quest, but "Treasure Island" is also a moral or psychological quest of some kind, so both the narrator and the reader have to look for answers in shifts in all characters of the story and not only in Long John Silver. The abundance of intertextual interconnections urges the reader to participate in unraveling intertexts and interpreting them in line with general and individual reader experience
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| Highly cited | No |
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