Nostalgic Metafiction: The Adventure Fiction of Stevenson, Kipling, and Conrad
Abstract
A sense of nostalgia for real adventure is ubiquitous in the adventure fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad. While many scholars consider the object of the writers’ nostalgia to be the exploratory age of the British Empire before her massive territorial expansion in 1890s, I argue that there is a missing piece in the current critical understanding of nostalgia: its textual dimension. Nostalgia in my texts is more than a historical longing for the youthful days of the Empire; it is a textual longing for the ideal adventure as imagined and constructed by the previous generation of the adventure stories. The nostalgic moments in Stevenson, Kipling, and Conrad are conscious meta- and inter-textual constructions. My approach to the nostalgia in these tales is a formalist intervention informed by Caroline Levine’s updated formalism and Northrop Frye’s old structuralism. I examine nostalgia as a formal element integral to these tales, which embodies both the emotional affinity to the ideals of the adventure fiction of the previous generation and the sophisticated awareness that their desires for adventure have been mediated by literary imagination. This study then explores the possibility of reading the nostalgia in the authors’ adventure fiction as a mode of metafictionality – a mode of rewriting and reinterpreting the generic conventions of the adventure genre and the romance form. The result of this exploration necessitates a creation of a new literary category, which I call ‘nostalgic metafiction’. I propose a way of understanding nostalgic texts as a literary category distinct from conventional metafictional writings like parodies or satires: as nostalgic metafiction that simultaneously sympathizes with and challenges the conventions of the genre to which it belongs.