Abstract
This thesis looks at the work of Robert Louis Stevenson in the context of Northrop
Frye's theory of archetypes and at the operations of the conventions of romance in
relation to structuralist and post-structuralist theories of narrative. It proposes the
unsustainability of the traditional or institutionalised model of romance provided by
Frye and considers, through Stevenson's essays and fictions, the development of
romance as a modern idiom. Using Frye's ideas as a basis for further study, this
thesis seeks to demonstrate that romance is a progressive rather than conservative
mode of fiction. Through the ideas expressed by Stevenson in his various guises as
an author and theorist, it presents a theory of romance as a genre in which the
functions of narrative undergo their most radical shifts and deviations from the
conventional bases of form.
Following the lead of his essays, it is shown that Stevenson's romances
deliberately set in motion a system of conventional elements which, while they
produce a dynamic narrative structure, tend also to exceed the sustainable limits of
the structures they are engaged in. By no means aimless, these activities represent an
attempt by Stevenson to recreate 'the certain almost sensual and quite illogical
tendencies in man'* which, he says, occasion the formation of romance, but which
are paradoxically incompatible with the logical conditions of romance as a
conventional mechanism. Consequently, it is demonstrated that, if Frye represents
the culmination of romance as a 'tradition' (or a point at which the structure of
romance can be audited and catalogued as a tradition), Stevenson, acting prior to
Frye, represents a point at which the underlying assumptions of this tradition are
preclusively denied.
