Kidnapped - Stevenson, Robert Louis

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Résumé :
Unabridged, with 60 original illustrations by Louis Rhead. ?Stevenson was fascinated by eighteenth century Scottish history. Kidnapped, set in eighteenth century Scotland, is inspired by real events, notably the Appin murder which occurred in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745; many of the characters, such as Alan Breck Stewart, are based on real people. The hero, David Balfour, was a composite of members of Stevenson's family. However, Stevenson writes: This is no furniture for the scholar's library, but a book for the winter evening ... to steal some young gentleman's attention from his Ovid, carry him awhile into the Highlands and the last century, and pack him to bed with some engaging images to mingle with his dreams. Kidnapped does just that, and, with its mix of suspense, crime, danger, escape, shipwrecks and pistols, it was an immediate success. However, Kidnapped is more than an adventure story, and has been praised by writers including Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, and Hilary Mantel. This unabridged edition contains 60 illustrations by Louis Rhead, the well-known children's book illustrator. The text is set in modern crisp easy-to-read font and would be a pleasure for children or adults to read. The Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, a celebrity during his lifetime, is best known for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and A Child's Garden of Verse. He was a great traveller, journeying to Europe, America and the South Pacific, where spent his last years in Samoa. There he was much loved by the Samoans who called him Tusitala (Samoan for Teller of Tales).

Biographie:
Robert Louis Stevenson (13 November 1850 - 3 December 1894) was a British novelist, poet, essayist, musician and travel writer. His most famous works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and A Child's Garden of Verses. He was a literary celebrity during his lifetime, and now ranks as the 26th most translated author in the world. His works have been admired by many other writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, and Jack London. Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, but he was seen for much of the 20th century as a second-class writer. He became relegated to children's literature and horror genres, condemned by literary figures such as Virginia Woolf (daughter of his early mentor Leslie Stephen), and he was gradually excluded from the canon of literature taught in schools. His exclusion reached its nadir in the 1973 2,000-page Oxford Anthology of English Literature where he was entirely unmentioned, and The Norton Anthology of English Literature excluded him from 1968 to 2000 (1st-7th editions), including him only in the 8th edition (2006). The late 20th century brought a re-evaluation of Stevenson as an artist of great range and insight, a literary theorist, an essayist and social critic, a witness to the colonial history of the Pacific Islands, and a humanist. He was praised by Roger Lancelyn Green, one of the Oxford Inklings, as a writer of a consistently high level of literary skill or sheer imaginative power and a pioneer of the Age of the Story Tellers along with H. Rider Haggard. He is now evaluated as a peer of authors such as Joseph Conrad (whom Stevenson influenced with his South Seas fiction) and Henry James, with new scholarly studies and organisations devoted to him. Throughout the vicissitudes of his scholarly reception, Stevenson has remained popular worldwide. According to the Index Translationum, Stevenson is ranked the 26th most translated author in the world, ahead of Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe.