Professor Glenda Norquay (Liverpool John Moores University, IASH Fellow): Mr Bangs, Mr Baxter and Robert Louis Stevenson: literary prosthetics and transatlantic publishing in the 1890s
This paper explores the network of authorial surrogates, taste-makers, literary gate-keepers and commercial agents that that operated around Robert Louis Stevenson in the last years of his life and those after his death. In the early 1890s Stevenson was living in Samoa, writing for British and U.S. markets and increasingly devolving responsibility for marketplace negotiations to friends and advisors. After his death, with his literary celebrity at its height, these transactions continued to be played out in a global context by authorial ‘representatives’. The paper draws on my research for the New Edinburgh Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s last and unfinished novel, St Ives and in the archives of Scribner’s publishing house to consider how highly specific and geographically extreme instances of prosthetic identity might illuminate more general understanding of the workings of cultural capital.