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Black Sails is an historical drama written as a prequel to Treasure Island. It did this by weaving the history surrounding the Pirate Republic of New Providence Island around fiction to create a compelling narrative exploring the force and evils of law and empire, and the lengths that some will go to in order to resist and be free. This paper will examine Black Sails as a social discourse text in order to critique the impact and tyranny, yet inevitability, of the law, and how soft power is feminised but requires queerness to be effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the concept of PlaySpace for literature as a shared spatial structure generated out of the adult-child dynamic at the heart of Children’s Fiction. It counters the negative dynamic between adult and child articulated by Rose, Lesnik-Oberstein and others, with a positive spatial dynamic for imaginative play and growth in which the child needs the adult as much as the adult needs the child. This shared space can function both positively and negatively. If PlaySpace requires the necessary frame of a protective adult for the child to be spatially secure, and thus play freely, then what happens when that figure is not present or turns out not to be what he or she appeared to be? The second half of the paper explores the concept further in relation to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, one of the earliest examples of fiction explicitly written for a child readership as a “story for boys” (Stevenson, [1894] 1925, p. 123). Treasure Island immediately problematises this psycho-spatial dynamic in and through Jim’s relationship to the island, and the reader’s relationship to Jim.

The aim of this article is to examine the legal, ethical and moral complications shown in Robert Louis Stevenson´s masterpiece, Treasure Island and the short story The Persons of the Tale. At first glance the romance is associated with ethical Manichaeism and puerility. Nothing could be further from the truth. The sympathy towards the criminals and the dislike towards the representatives of the order, betrayal and loyalty, rigor of the legal system and personal gain... All of them are characteristic features of the novel. This analysis shows a shifting moral landscape where the characters of the plot make ethical choice out of the moral and social conventions of society. Of particular interest is the reflection about the function of the representatives of the legal order in the novel. There are not legal institutions on the island. But we are reminded of the presence of the rule of law at all times. Stevenson uses this particular scenario to express a special and suggestive moral code where ambiguity, paradox and contradiction are the dominant pattern. Loyal to his legal and moral roots of Scottish Enlightenment as well as to an Aristotelian framework, Stevenson shows the connection between morals and action. El objetivo de este artículo es analizar las complejidades jurídicas, éticas y morales presentes en La isla del tesoro, obra maestra de Robert Louis Stevenson, y en la narración Los personajes del relato. La metodología consiste en la observación cualitativa de varios pasajes del libro. Ese análisis muestra un paisaje moral cambiante donde los personajes hacen elecciones morales fuera de las convenciones morales y sociales. No hay instituciones jurídicas en la isla; pero en todo momento se nos hace recordar el imperio de la ley. Stevenson utiliza este particular escenario para expresar un código moral muy especial y sugerente, donde la ambigüedad, lo paradójico y lo contradictorio son las tónicas dominantes. Hay muy pocas obras sobre Stevenson desde un enfoque iusfilosófico, por lo cual el artículo hace una aportación al campo del Derecho y la Literatura. DOWNLOAD THIS PAPER FROM SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=3258317

In R. L. Stevenson's Treasure Island, the motif of the treasure hunt resonates strongly with the economic realities of eighteenth-century Britain, particularly when viewed within the context of the British joint venture boom. This boom erupted in its most hysterical form in the 'South Sea Company Craze' of 1720. In Stevenson's fiction, overseas joint ventures and high seas piracy share certain implicit commonalities, though one of these is never mentioned – or, more accurately, it is repressed. In Pierre Macherey's terms, this repressed element constitutes a non-dit of the fiction, something without which the text could not have been written, yet whose manifest presence would also have made the text impossible. At the centre of this constituting-yet-absent history, a shady commodity lurks: the trade in human merchandise, whose sales fill the English coffers with Spanish silver and gold. Attempting to articulate what Stevenson's pirate story could not say, this article probes its displaced politico-economic history, concluding that the novel's exotic treasure hunt serves as an ideological alibi for the profit-laundering of its trade in human slaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to examine the methods by which the subjunctive mood is translated and to identify the most frequent forms in the original literary text and its Russian translations. This study involves a complex methodology, including the continuous sampling method, frequency analytic methods, a descriptive-analytical method, and linguistic analysis of English and Russian sentences. The material for the study included complex and simple subjunctive mood sentences extracted from the original English text of Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, and its translation to Russian by Nikolai Korneevich Chukovsky. The results present and discuss features of the subjunctive mood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article reads the 1884 trial of The Queen v. Dudley and Stephens about the "custom of the sea"(cannibalism) alongside popular adventure novels of the same decade by R. L. Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard. The trial functioned ritually to impose and affirm a community conscience in which the rule of law itself became a kind of cultural fiction for condemning the necessity defense as unmanly and unEnglish. The legal authorities staged disorder in order to contain it. Their spectacular trial functioned ritually to transform the same symbolic patterns traced in the adventure novels into moral truth and legal precedent. This analysis restores the trial of Dudley and Stephens to the sensational status it had in 1884 and juxtaposes it with adventure novels to reframe it as an important episode in a larger cultural narrative about the form and fortunes of a hegemonic, late-Victorian imperial masculinity. [147 words] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pirate tropes that pervade popular culture today can be traced in large part to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel, Treasure Island. However, it is the novel’s afterlife on film that has generated fictional pirates as we now understand them. By tracing the transformation of the author’s pirate captain, Long John Silver, from N. C. Wyeth’s illustrations (1911) through the cinematic performances of Wallace Beery (1934) and Robert Newton (1950), this paper demonstrates that the films have created a quintessentially “American pirate”—a figure that has necessarily evolved in response to differences in medium, the performances of the leading actors, and filmgoers’ expectations. Comparing depictions of Silver’s dress, physique, and speech patterns, his role vis-à-vis Jim Hawkins, each adaptation’s narrative point of view, and Silver’s departure at the end of the films reveals that while the Silver of the silver screen may appear to represent a significant departure from the text, he embodies a nuanced reworking of and testament to the author’s original.

'Small Experimental Action' is a title derived from Freud's account of thinking. The piece draws attention to the psychoanalytic conception of thinking as an experimental action, and seeks to draw attention to writing as an experimental action, and because it is concerned with reading literary and psychoanalytic texts it draws attention to reading as an experimental action too. It explores agency and risk in ways directly inspired by Shoshana Felman's account of reading, and by the voyage of the coracle in Stevenson's Treasure Island. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Catalan children's author Josep Vallverdú published two crossover stories based on Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island. Les raons de Divendres (Friday's Reasons) (2003) gives an account of the episode of Crusoe and Friday told from the point of view of the servant, whereas El testament de John Silver (John Silver's Will) (2007) deals with the adventures of the pirate after searching for the treasure in the Caribbean. This paper demonstrates how Vallverdú uses his experience as a writer and translator to transform two canonical novels, through transposition into a contemporary context, in a way that facilitates an interaction between Catalan literature and English literature. In keeping with this exploration of literary tradition, the two sequels are also analysed as twenty-first century expressions of a Western literary tradition that abounds in adventure stories set at sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the functions of paratextual and intra-textual pirate treasure maps in works of literature for children and young adults. Based on an examination of how the indexical X that 'marks the spot' operates as the focal point of the semiotic endeavours of treasure maps, the article outlines the fragile stance of maps between referentiality (thus kindling readers' imagination) and the potential to disappoint reader expectations (since maps are never congruent with the territory they refer to). The discussion is exemplified by specific consideration of the treasure map from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883) and the map of the turtle island in the German children's picturebook Käpt'n Sharky und das Geheimnis der Schatzinsel (2006), which are also seen as examples of treasure maps which play with the expectations of both readers and characters alike, all tied to the X found on any treasure map. The article ends with an analysis of the function of both maps and treasures in the context of open-ended reading games of imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there have been several dozen major ‘eco-city’ initiatives underway worldwide, primarily in response to global climate change and growing urbanization. Among these, two have been in the making since the early 2000s in California, USA, from where the eco-city movement originated over 20 years ago: Treasure Island, in San Francisco, and Sonoma Mountain Village, in Rohnert Park (Sonoma County). This article analyses these urban sustainability initiatives in terms of the emerging hybrid governance relations and interactions and how these inform the planning, co-ordination and implementation of the initiatives. Among the key governance aspects discussed are the partial privatization through elaborate public–private arrangements, the role of international partners in shaping the urban sustainability agenda and the project-based approach used to effect the initiatives. The findings suggest a prevailing mode of ‘governance at a distance’ and related innovation in governance mechanisms, which, in turn, impacts on how urban sustainability is conceptualized and put into practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the serious decline in the number of undergraduates majoring in the humanities in general, and literature in particular, teachers of Children's Literature have a unique opportunity to serve their discipline by tapping the power of classroom dialogue to introduce students to the practical reasoning central to humanistic study. This essay takes Long John Silver, from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (), as a model for generating lively discussion that begins with literary matters but leads, with help from the teacher, to fundamental questions about the role of the humanities in students' education and in their lives. In the process, the essay traces a pedagogical strategy that moves from matters of plot and character, to issues of ethics and judgment, to larger questions regarding approximate knowledge and sound reasoning about the complexities of the human condition. This inquiry focuses specifically on the charming but villainous Silver and the possible explanations for his escape at the end of the novel. But the ambiguity and fascination of his character are also catalysts for wide-ranging classroom discussion of a kind that Children's Literature routinely promotes and sustains. Such discussion can provide broad, balanced insight into the nature and variety of critical understanding. As such, Children's Literature and the pedagogy it supports serves to identify and enliven the benefits of humanistic study at a crucial moment of academic history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pirate tropes that pervade popular culture today can be traced in large part to Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 novel, Treasure Island. However, it is the novel's afterlife on film that has generated fictional pirates as we now understand them. By tracing the transformation of the author's pirate captain, Long John Silver, from N. C. Wyeth's illustrations (1911) through the cinematic performances of Wallace Beery (1934) and Robert Newton (1950), this paper demonstrates that the films have created a quintessentially "American pirate"—a figure that has necessarily evolved in response to differences in medium, the performances of the leading actors, and filmgoers' expectations. Comparing depictions of Silver's dress, physique, and speech patterns, his role vis-à-vis Jim Hawkins, each adaptation's narrative point of view, and Silver's departure at the end of the films reveals that while the Silver of the silver screen may appear to represent a significant departure from the text, he embodies a nuanced reworking of and testament to the author's original. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]