Kidnapped; or, The Lad with the Silver Button - Hardcover

Stevenson, Robert Louis

3.79

64,616 ratings by Goodreads

9780873281775: Kidnapped; or, The Lad with the Silver Button

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0873281772 ISBN 13: 9780873281775

Publisher: Huntington Library Press, 1999

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

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 without 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.

Drawing on the unique autograph manuscript in the Huntington Library, Professor Barry Menikoff has faithfully reproduced the text as Stevenson originally wrote it, restoring the author's language and punctuation, as well as the authentic Scots quality of his diction.

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. 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. 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.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

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 the Author:

Barry Menikoff is professor of English and American literature at the University of Hawaii and one of the world's leading authorities on Robert Louis Stevenson. He has previously published Robert Louis Stevenson and "The Beach of Falesa" and a collection of Stevenson's shorter fiction, Tales from the Prince of Storytellers.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.