Robert Louis Stevenson's work has enjoyed a critical renaissance in the past decade, with biennial international conferences devoted to the writer both reflecting and prompting an array of fresh approaches to his oeuvre. This new attention has been fed by the burgeoning scholarly interest in travel writing, colonialism, and the body. Oliver Buckton's informed and sophisticated book skillfully combines these theoretical preoccupations with a meticulous exploration of Stevenson's writing, probing the influence of travel on his fictional and nonfictional prose works. Buckton develops “cruising” as a critical term, using it to describe the “preferred leisurely mode of transport” (3) that Stevenson employed throughout his life, from the early bohemian travels narrated in An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) to his final cruises around the South Seas. In the final half of the nineteenth century, travel and transport became ever more globalized and mechanized (indeed, Stevenson chose to settle on Samoa because the Oceanic Line mail steamers between San Francisco and Sydney regularly stopped there). Yet Buckton argues that Stevenson remained drawn to a random mode of travel, which profoundly informed the shape of his narratives. Such journeying, Buckton suggests, entailed “a narrative method that produces [generically and formally] unstable texts of travel” (7).

Part 1 examines Stevenson's representation of the material body. Buckton considers the donkey as a figure for corporeality in Travels with a Donkey, and the motif of the reanimated corpse in works including The Wrong Box (1889) and The Master of Ballantrae (1888–89; “The Body-Snatcher” [1884], Stevenson's most striking tale of a revenant corpse, is surprisingly absent from the discussion). Buckton pays welcome attention to the homoerotic interpretative possibilities offered by the imagery of the “ass” and of burial in the “back garden” (76, 50), but the focus on homosexuality is sometimes strained and in places leads to a distortion or even suppression of the works’ concern with heterosexuality. This tendency persists throughout the book. Thus, Buckton later interprets Stevenson's misgivings about realism as anxiety about representing homosexuality. Stevenson wrote in an 1892 letter to Sidney Colvin that “I am a realist and a prosaist, and a most fanatical lover of plain physical sensations plainly and expressly rendered; hence my perils. To do love [in this way] … , there were grossness ready made!” Buckton glosses this as Stevenson's recognition of “the obstacles to representing passion between men … [in] publicly acceptable discourse” (141). Yet Stevenson's letter more plausibly concerns the barriers to the candid portrayal of heterosexual passion.

Part 2 illuminates in intriguing ways the role of the map in Stevenson's historical romances, Treasure Island (1881–82) and Kidnapped (1886), showing how these narratives were driven by a new concern for marketability and profit. While Buckton is right to emphasize the shift away from his earlier antibourgeois attitude, it is notable that Stevenson's enthusiasm for popular authorship was tempered by unease. He notoriously complained of the “bestiality of the beast whom we feed,” worrying that there “must be something wrong in me, or I would not be popular” (Stevenson to Edmund Gosse, January 1886, in Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Ernest Mehew [New Haven, CT, 1997], 299–300). Treasure Island is also a more complex and ambivalent narrative than Buckton suggests. Jim Hawkins, he claims, is the “ideal protagonist of a romance” because he “acts rather than thinks” (136), but the ending witnesses his retreat from a life of action, as he remains haunted by his experience of adventure. Buckton's assertion that there is “no … questioning of the right of the British flag to be shown on Treasure Island” (209) is also undermined by the unsettling kinship that the narrative establishes between Britain's naval heroes and the novel's pirates.

Parts 3 and 4, focusing on Stevenson's writings from the South Seas, form the most compelling sections of the book. They move fluently between fiction and nonfiction and between Scottish and Polynesian writings, examining how episodes and characters first encountered in Stevenson's journals were then recycled, appearing in his travel-writing collection In the South Seas (1896) and in his fiction. Buckton is at his strongest in lucid close readings, tracing imagery that runs through his work (the first island landfall, the figurehead on the beach). He charts intriguing resonances between David Balfour (1893, published in Britain as Catriona) and A Footnote to History (1892). However, although Buckton claims that critics still see Stevenson's Scottish and South Seas writings as distinct, there is already much excellent work on the cross-fertilization between the two parts of his oeuvre: for example, Emma Letley and Catherine Kerrigan have shown, respectively, how David Balfour and Weir of Hermiston are shaped by Stevenson's Pacific experiences (“Introduction,” in Kidnapped and Catriona [Oxford, 1986], xx; “Introduction,” in Weir of Hermiston [Edinburgh, 1995], xxxii). Nonetheless, Buckton gives expert readings of the anticolonial politics of Stevenson's late writing. “The Beach of Falesá,” he shows, subverts ideas about racial difference and exposes the constructed nature of notions of whiteness. The examination of The Ebb-Tide (1893–94) reveals Stevenson's interest in how the disease of colonialism affects not only colonized peoples but also the colonizers themselves. Buckton could have pushed further his analysis of the novella's erotic imagery: the sexual attraction exerted by the missionary Attwater is suggestively interlaced with class power. He offers, however, a perceptive interpretation of the narrative's concern with “cruising,” whether it is understood as adventure, invasion, or attempted seduction. His alertness to the multiple significations of “cruising” exemplifies the fresh and productive nature of Buckton's approach and makes the book a valuable addition to the study of nineteenth-century travel writing and fiction.