In 1887 Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an autobiographical essay titled “A College Magazine,” in which he mockingly recalls his efforts as co-editor of the Edinburgh University Magazine, a short-lived monthly that expired after its fourth number. He also describes his apprenticeship as a writer, making no secret of the fact that it was primarily an exercise in imitation:

Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either [→ 91] some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was called The Vanity of Morals […] written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghostlike, from the ashes) no less than three times: first in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne. (29: 29)¹

Stevenson is well aware of the intertextual origin of his own writing. He also points out that the “sedulous ap[ing]” of other writers is the way to become original, because originality requires mastery of the entire field of expression, including all of its different registers and styles:

Before he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible; before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he should long have practised the literary scales; and it is only after years of such gymnastics that he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and (within the narrow limit of a man’s ability) able to do it. (29: 30-31)

In “A College Magazine,” Stevenson focusses on the intertextuality of style. Elsewhere, he acknowledges the intertextuality of other elements of his works. In “My First Book,” another autobiographical essay, he recounts how Treasure Island came into being, and again makes no secret of his debts to other writers, this time focussing on setting, character and motifs:

I am now upon a painful chapter. No doubt the parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe. I think little of these, they are trifles and details: and no man can hope to have a monopoly of skeletons or make a corner in talking birds. The stockade, I am told, is from Masterman Ready. It may be, I care not a jot. […] It is my debt to Washington Irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I believe plagiarism was [→ 92] rarely carried farther. I chanced to pick up the Tales of a Traveller some years ago, with a view to an anthology of prose narrative, and the book flew up and struck me; Billy Bones, his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit and a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters—all were there, all were the property of Washington Irving. (2: xxvii)²

Stevenson composed a similar essay about The Master of Ballantrae, focussing on the sources of this novel, and he contemplated writing a series of such essays as prefaces to his novels for the first collected edition of his works, the so-called Edinburgh Edition.³

Stevenson’s emphasis on the intertextual dimension of literature is related to the position that he took in the literary debates of his time. He lived in the heyday of realism when many of his fellow writers believed that they had to present faithful pictures of ordinary experience and everyday reality. Stevenson, by contrast, rejects the mimetic view of literature and the obligation to represent reality. He insists on the autonomy of literature, subscribing to an aestheticism not unlike that of Walter Pater or Oscar Wilde. A paradigmatic instance of the opposition between realist and aestheticist views of literature in the late nineteenth century is provided by Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction” and Stevenson’s “A Humble Remonstrance,” a response to James’s essay. While James argues that “[t]he only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life” (25), Stevenson claims that life and literature are worlds apart from each other. Instead of representing life, the writer should create a structural pattern based on formal principles and a rigorous selection of motifs; the literary text is a “figmentary abstraction” (29: 135), not unlike a “proposition of geometry” (29: 136). A similar instance of the opposition between realism and aestheticism can be found in the review essay that James wrote when a volume of Stevenson’s letters was posthumously published in 1899. James is intrigued by Stevenson’s references to literature, in particular the remarks on the books he was writing or planning to write. Characteristically, what James finds lacking in these remarks is the subject, i.e. the slice of life to be represented:

[→ 93] I remember no instance of his expressing a subject, as one may say, as a subject—hinting at what novelists mainly know, one would imagine, as the determinant thing in it, the idea out of which it springs. The form, the envelope, is there with him, headforemost, as the idea; titles, names, that is, chapters, sequences, orders, while we are still asking ourselves how it was that he primarily put to his own mind what it was all to be about. (“Robert Louis Stevenson” 12)

The passage indicates the difference between James’s realist imagination and the formalist imagination of Stevenson. Because of his anti-mimetic stance, Stevenson emphasises the elements of literature that are not bound up with a commitment to experience and reality. These include, to borrow James’s terms, “[t]he form, the envelope […] chapters, sequences, orders,” but also the literary canon, the previous texts that any new text is derived from.

In “A College Magazine” and “My First Book,” Stevenson focuses on the debts he owes to previous writers; however, there are also the debts that later writers owe to him. As is well known, Stevenson is the author of two texts that have become modern myths: Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Both have been adapted for the screen many times, and the latter has also inspired a number of rewritings, including Emma Tennant’s Two Women of London (1989), Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990) and David Edgar’s play The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1991).⁴ Some of Stevenson’s lesser-known works have also been rewritten by others. Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, is based on one of the tales in More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, which was co-authored by Stevenson and his wife Fanny. Doyle also expressed his great admiration for Stevenson by following the latter’s “The Pavilion on the Links” very closely in The Mystery of Cloomber.⁵

“Intertextual Stevenson” is evidently a rich (and under-explored) field, which is why it was chosen as the topic of a conference held at Ruhr University Bochum in June 2024, organised by the writers of this introduction. The conference topic was understood very broadly by the participants. “Text” was not limited to strings of words; there were papers on illustration and film. “Intertextual” was likewise not defined in [→ 94] a restrictive manner. Using the terminology proposed by Gérard Genette, it included intertextuality in the narrow sense (the selective use of another text, as in allusion and quotation), hypotextuality (a rewriting of an entire text, as in parody), architextuality (the affiliation of a text with a genre and thus with many other texts of the same sort) and metatextuality (the explicit reference of one text to another).⁶ Some participants pointed out Stevenson’s “autotextuality,” his tendency to echo and rewrite his own works; others explored his “interdiscoursivity,” a recourse not to specific texts or genres but to more generally defined discourses (this concept can be related to “A College Magazine” and the way Stevenson imagines mature writers knowing their “literary scales” or discourses, with “legions of words” and “dozens of turns of phrase” at their disposition). A selection of articles based on the papers given at the conference will now be published in Connotations.