This is a study of Henry James's changing attitudes toward history as a narrative model, moving from his early interest in "scientific" historiography to the radical, anti-historical character of his late works. These shifts can only be understood, the author argues, in terms of James's views on literary censorship and the politics of reading, and his engagement with the reading practices of marginalized groups: women, the working class, other cultures, and the avant-garde.

Robert Louis Stevenson's departure from Europe in 1887 coincided with a vocational crisis prompted by his father's death. Impatient with his established identity as a writer, Stevenson was eager to explore different ways of writing, at the same time that living in the Pacific stimulated a range of latent intellectual and political interests. Roslyn Jolly examines the crucial period from 1887 to 1894, focusing on the self-transformation wrought in Stevenson's Pacific travel-writing and political texts. Jolly shows how Stevenson's desire to understand unfamiliar Polynesian and Micronesian...