Empire on a Small Scale: Robert Louis Stevensonâs Footnote as a SÄmoan Microhistory

Lucio De Capitani

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Chapter 6 Empire on a Small Scale: Robert Louis Stevensonâs Footnote as a SÄmoan Microhistory

In: Scottish Literature of the South Seas

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Lucio De Capitani

Lucio De Capitani
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 92â106

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004682177_008

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Robert Louis Stevensonâs interest for historiography and historical modes of narration has been well established in recent scholarship, thanks to seminal works like Barry Menikoffâs Narrating Scotland (2005) and Roslyn Jollyâs Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific (2009). Building on these studies, this chapter elaborates on Stevensonâs approach to historical narratives in the last phase of his production by comparing two non-fictional texts, dedicated, respectively, to Samoa and Scotland: A Footnote to History (1892), his account of the Samoan Civil War, and Records of a Family of Engineers (1896), his unfinished, posthumously published history of the Stevenson family. Through this juxtaposition, this chapter highlights two seemingly opposing trends in Stevensonâs historiographical approach. On the one hand, in the Footnote, Stevenson anticipates formal strategies employed by micro-historians like Carlo Ginzburg decades later: most notably, he focuses on a reduced scale and on singular, extraordinary events that are able to question and estrange mainstream historical narratives. On the other hand, in Records, one of Stevensonâs key strategies is to narrate family history through a variety of mythological patterns (such as frontier and biblical narratives), locating the individual experiences of his ancestors within recognizable, traditional schemes.These two approaches, and by consequence the two texts, are in conflict: mythology actively establishes grand, unifying narratives, whereas microhistory is meant to be a critical counterpoint to those very narratives. However, these approaches also coexist because they both share the purpose of reducing raw historical âdataâ to ânarratable objects,â and are at least in part intertwined within Stevensonâs heterogeneous, ambivalent telling of world history.

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Scottish Literature of the South Seas

Critical Studies of Scotland and the Pacific

Series:Â SCROLL: Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature, Volume: 35Â andÂ SCROLL: Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature Online, Volume: 35

Cover Scottish Literature of the South Seas

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004682177

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 25 Dec 2024

Subjects
- Literature and Cultural Studies

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Chapter 6 Empire on a Small Scale: Robert Louis Stevensonâs Footnote as a SÄmoan Microhistory

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Scottish Literature of the South Seas

Critical Studies of Scotland and the Pacific

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Chapter 6 Empire on a Small Scale: Robert Louis Stevensonâs Footnote as a SÄmoan Microhistory