This interdisciplinary project explores the legacies of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific writing, investigating the relevance of his work to contemporary readers in Sāmoa, Scotland and Hawai‘i, and producing new art and poetry inspired by the three short stories published in Stevenson’s 1893 collection Island Nights’ Entertainments.

These include ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’ – set in Hawai‘i – and ‘The Beach of Falesá’, rooted in Stevenson’s experience of Sāmoan culture. Given that educational institutions throughout the world are actively engaged in decolonising their curricula, Stevenson’s work and legacy present a particularly valuable focus of inquiry.

Stevenson became actively involved in supporting Samoan and Hawaiian indigenous sovereignty movements at a crucial period just before these islands were annexed by the US and Germany, and yet his Pacific fiction, while iconoclastic in featuring indigenous protagonists with considerable agency and dignity, and offering a critical proto-modernist perspective on western imperialism, still upholds many of the colonial stereotypes typical of fin-de-siecle western literature.