"out of My Country and Myself I Go": Identity and Writing in Stevenson's Early Travel Books‪.‬

Although Stevenson criticism has almost ignored his early travel works, these books offer valuable insights into his identity as a writer. His journeys in France and Belgium allowed him temporarily to escape the cultural constraints of home and to use this estrangement to experiment with new, though evanescent, forms of selfhood. His journeys were propitious occasions for writing because he inscribed himself thereby in mobile, aleatory narratives that eschewed purpose. His journeys and his writing united in being undertaken for their own sake. Both were "pure, dispassionate adventures" that accepted the instability of world and self, thus opening a space in which he could imagine that they were new again. Although he knew that this sense of originality might be illusory, he preferred his illusion to others' reality because it permitted him to write. **********