Kidnapped - Softcover

Stevenson, Robert Louis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006913776 ISBN 13: 9780006913771

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, 1987

Synopsis

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886.

Kidnapped is an historical fiction adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, written as a "boys' novel" and first published in the magazine Young Folks in 1886. The novel has attracted the praise and admiration of writers as diverse as Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, and Hilary Mantel. >
Kidnapped/ is set around 18th-century Scottish events, notably the "Appin Murder", which occurred near Ballachulish in 1752 in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745. Many of the characters were real people, including one of the principals, Alan Breck Stewart. The political situation of the time is portrayed from multiple viewpoints, and the Scottish Highlanders are treated sympathetically.
Robert Louis Stevension (1850-1894). Though the originality and power of Stevenson’s writings was recognised from the first by a select few, it was only slowly that he caught the ear of the general public. The tide may be said to have turned with the publication of Treasure Island in 1882, which at once gave him an assured place among the foremost imaginative writers of the day.
His greatest power is, however, shown in those works which deal with Scotland in the 18th century, such as Kidnapped, and in those, e.g., The Child’s Garden of Verse which exhibit his extraordinary insight into the psychology of child-life. Stevenson’s style is singularly fascinating, graceful, various, subtle, and with a charm all its own.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Robert Louis Stevenson always considered "Kidnapped," the tale of 17-year-old David Balfour's adventures in the remote islands and highlands of Scotland with renegade soldier Alan Breck Stewart, to be his greatest novel, but when the classic adventure tale was published in 1886, it was missing much of what its author held dear. His English publisher had excised many of the Scottish words and phrases he had used to evoke the suspense of the novel. From simple misreadings to deliberate revisions, subsequent printed editions represented major departures from Stevenson's handwritten text. Now Barry Menikoff has restored the author's language and punctuation, as well as the authentic Scots quality of his diction. In doing so, he has given readers a clearer picture of both Stevenson's skill as a storyteller and the novel's social and political context.

From the Inside Flap:

For the better part of a century "Kidnapped" has occupied an ambiguous position in literary and cultural studies. Its initial appearance in a weekly magazine called "Young Folks Paper," along with Stevenson's disingenuous comment that the novel had a diverting rather than a serious aim, have in effect trapped the book in the never-neverland of children's literature. Yet it is universally acknowledges as a classic of world literature and the novelist always considered it his finest achievement -- taken together with its sequel, "David Balfour," the best he was capable of in fiction. Now, for the first readers can plainly see why Stevenson placed his story of David Balfour on so high a pedestal. Drawing on the unique autograph manuscript in California's Huntington Library, Professor Barry Menikoff faithfully reproduces the text as Stevenson originally wrote it, restoring the punctuation (of which the novelist was a master) and recovering the distinctive and often singular language that had been altered or deleted. The effect is to deepen and illuminate the Scottish texture of the novel. For a book so embedded in Scottish history as "Kidnapped," so revelatory of its fierce loyalties and violent enmities, the discovery that Stevenson was even more nationalistic than we had known comes at an opportune moment, with the opening of the new Scottish parliament. This handsome new edition of a novel whose avowed purpose was the recovery of an important part of Scots history reproduces for the first time the original drawings that accompanied the text during its serialization in "Young Folks." Professor Menikoff's substantial introduction situates the book in its cultural context, and enables us to see why Stevenson's contemporaries were both entranced and awed by his achievement. And in his extensive notes to the novel he reveals Stevenson's enormous prestige as an authority on language, both English and Scots, for "Kidnapped" was widely drawn upon as a reference by lexicographers for the "Oxford English Dictionary" and the "Scottish National Dictionary." Finally, for a tale that charts the "wanderings" of David Balfour over the land and seas of Scotland, this edition is the first to provide a gazetteer of place-names encountered during the course of those travels.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0006913776
• ISBN 13: 9780006913771
• Binding: Paperback