Behind Adventure Stories. R. L. Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Catriona as Narratives of Identity

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) is well-known as an adventure story, an image that is reinforced by its film adaptations, while Catriona (1893), a much less popular novel, is usually referred to just as the sequel of Kidnapped, and by association also treated as representing this genre. Inspired by recent research on the archival sources underlying the two novels, this paper interprets them as narratives of discovering identity, drawing arguments not only from the construction of the plot and its historical background, but also from the linguistic polyphony (Scots, English and Gaelic) applied by the writer, which in literary works is usually indicative of some special agenda. The political reading of Stevenson’s two novels disguised as adventure stories is corroborated by the author’s views on the relationship between the British empire and Scotland expressed in his essay “The Foreigner at Home” (1882). The paper also claims that Catriona is in fact crucial in the pair of novels, providing an intertextual framework for Kidnapped that facilitates interpreting both texts as jointly narrating a journey in the course of which the main character discovers the complexity of his country’s and community’s identity, and hence demanding an acknowledgement of the value and distinctness of Scottish culture from English-language readers.