Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-mp689 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T13:25:59.582Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

IMITATION FICTION: PIRATE CITINGS IN ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S TREASURE ISLAND

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 April 2013

Monica F. Cohen*
Affiliation:
Columbia University

Extract

When Charles Dickens tried to lobby for American support of an international copyright agreement during his wildly popular 1842 tour of the United States, the English author was famously shocked to find himself lambasted as an elitist who dared expect payment for what Americans believed they had the right to read for free (McGill 109–40; Claybaugh 71; Pettitt 152). Dickens encountered in the practice of literary piracy, or what was called in the United States, the culture of reprinting, a deep fissure in capitalist democratic culture between individual ownership and public access, an ideological divide that forms the backdrop for the creation and circulation of nineteenth-century print. If the legal privatization of intellectual property hovered in the imagination of so many Victorian writers, it formed the happy ending of a long nineteenth-century struggle over literary piracy, a contention of goods that shaped the Victorian stage as we well as the transatlantic literary marketplace.

Type
Work in Progress
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. London: Penguin, 2003.Google Scholar
Austen, Jane. Persuasion. London: Penguin, 1987.Google Scholar
Balzac, Honoré de. Old Goriot. London: Penguin, 1951.Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Braudel, Fernand. The Wheels of Commerce. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.Google Scholar
Bristow, Joseph. Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man's World. London: HarperCollins Academic, 1991.Google Scholar
Buckton, Oliver S. Cruising With Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative and the Colonial Body. Athens: U of Ohio P, 2007.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.Google Scholar
Byrne, David. “Pirates,” Grown Backwards. Nonesuch, 2004. CD.Google Scholar
Calder, Jenni. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study. New York: Oxford UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Claybaugh, Amanda. The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Clinton-Baddeley, V. C.The Burlesque Tradition in the English Theatre after 1600. London: Methuen, 1952.Google Scholar
Columbia Encyclopedia. “International Monetary System.” New York: Columbia UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Cordingly, David, ed. Pirates: Terror on the High Seas from the Caribbean to the South China Sea. Atlanta: Turner, 1996.Google Scholar
Cordingly, DavidUnder the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates. New York: Random House, 2006.Google Scholar
Deane, Bradley. “Imperial Boyhood: Piracy and the Play Ethic.” Victorian Studies 53.4 (2011): 689714.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Defoe, Daniel. A General History of the Pyrates. Ed. Schonhorn, Manuel. New York: Dover, 1999.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context,” Limited Inc. Chicago: Northwestern UP, 1977.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. London: Penguin, 2003.Google Scholar
Douglass, Paul, and Burwick, Frederick. Romantic-Era Songs. http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/douglass/music/index.html. Web. 5 May 2005.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. London: Penguin, 2003.Google Scholar
Emeljanow, Victor. “Staging the Pirate: The Ambiguities of Representation and the Significance of Convention.” Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth-Century, Ed. Moore, Grace. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. 223–41.Google Scholar
Farr, Liz. “Paper Dreams and Romantic Projections: The Nineteenth-Century Toy Theater, Boyhood and Aesthetic Play. The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture. Ed. Denisoff, Dennis. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. 4361.Google Scholar
Furbank, P. N., and Owens, W. R.. The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Gilbert, W. S., and Sullivan, Sir Arthur. The Pirates of Penzance. Ed. Simspson, Carl and Hammett Jones, Ephraim. Mineola: Dover, 2001.Google Scholar
Harman, Claire. Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: Harper Perennial 2005.Google Scholar
Harvey, Keith. “Camp Talk and Citationality: A Queer Take on ‘Authentic’ and ‘Represented’ Utterance.” The Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002): 11451165.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Honaker, Lisa. “‘One Man to Rely On’: Long John Silver and the Shifting Character of Victorian Boys’ Fiction.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 34.1 (Winter 2004): 2753.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teaching of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Metheuen, 1985.Google Scholar
Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.Google Scholar
Johnson, Edgar. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. New York: Penguin, 1986.Google Scholar
Jordan, John. “The Purloined Handkerchief.” Oliver Twist. Ed. Kaplan, Fred. New York: Norton, 1993. 580–93.Google Scholar
Kestner, Joseph. Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915. Burlington: Ashgate, 2010.Google Scholar
Kiely, Robert. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1964.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Kulick, Don. “Gay and Lesbian Language.” Annual Review of Anthropology 29 (2000): 243–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lerner, Seth. Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009.Google Scholar
Loman, Andrew. “The Sea Cook's Wife: Evocations of Slavery in Treasure Island.Children's Literature 38 (2010): 126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. “A Psalm of Life. What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist.” The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. www.gutenberg.org. Web. 30 July 2012.Google Scholar
Mathison, Ymitri. “Maps, Pirates and Treasure: The Commodification of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century Boys’ Adventure Fiction.” The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture. Ed. Denisoff, Dennis. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. 173–85.Google Scholar
Mattacks, Kate. “Acts of Piracy: Black Ey'd Susan, Theatrical Publishing and the Victorian Stage. Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth-Century. Ed. Moore, Grace. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. 133–47.Google Scholar
McGill, Meredith. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007.Google Scholar
McLynn, Frank. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. London: Hutchinson, 1993.Google Scholar
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: U California P, 1987.Google Scholar
Moore, John Robert. Defoe in the Pillory and Other Studies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1939.Google Scholar
Moore, John Robert. “Defoe, Stevenson, and the Pirates.” ELH 10.1 (March 1943): 3560.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900. London: Verso, 1998.Google Scholar
Nelson, Claudia. “Adult Children's Literature in Victorian Britain.” The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture. Ed. Denisoff, Dennis. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. 137–49.Google Scholar
Nelson, Claudia. “Victorian Boyhood Continued: The Victorian ‘Child-Man.’” CUNY Annual Victorian Conference. 6 May 2011.Google Scholar
Norquay, Glenda. Robert Louis Stevenson and Theories of Reading: The Reader as Vagabond. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Peck, John. Maritime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in British and American Novels, 1719–1917. New York: Palgrave, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pettitt, Clare. Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Phegley, Jennifer. “Literary Piracy, Nationalism, and Women Readers in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1850–1855.” American Periodicals 14.1 (2004): 6390.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pollock's Blackbeard The Pirate; or, The Jolly Buccaneers. Whitstable and Walsall: Pryor, 2007.Google Scholar
Rogoziński, Jan. Pirates!: Brigands, Buccaneers, and Privateers in Fact, Fiction, and Legend. New York: Facts on File, 1995.Google Scholar
Sandison, Alan. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism: A Future Feeling. London: Macmillian, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shell, Marc. Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Victoria Ford. “Toy Presses and Treasure Maps: Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne as Collaborators.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 35.1 (Spring 2010): 2654.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Speaight, George. The History of the English Toy Theatre. London: Studio Vista, 1969.Google Scholar
Stedman, Jane. W. S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and His Theatre. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Robert Louis. “My First Book,” Treasure Island. Appendix A. London: Penguin, 1999.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Robert Louis. “A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured,” Memories and Portraits. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1895. http://www.robertlouisstevenson.org/essay. Web. 6 Aug. 2011.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. London: Penguin, 1999.Google Scholar
Summers, Mark, and Baur, John. Talk Like a Pirate Day. http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html. 2006–2011. Web. 4 Aug. 2011.Google Scholar
Sutherland, James. Daniel Defoe: A Critical Study. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.Google Scholar
Terry, Richard. The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature from Butler to Sterne. London: Palgrave, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Carolyn. Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody. New York: Columbia UP, 2011.Google Scholar
Wood, Naomi. “Gold Standards and Silver Subversions: Treasure Island and the Romance of Money.” Children's Literature 26 (1998): 6185.CrossRefGoogle Scholar