Piracy and "Treasure Island"

Paper Summary:

The paper analyzes the role of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel "Treasure Island" in both creating and transmitting the myth of the pirate. The paper discusses how this myth reflects the spirit of individualism and initiative that resonates with the Western psyche, and this is what continues to excite successive generations of readers. The paper catalogues the influences other writers had on Stevenson, including Edgar Allan Poe and Daniel Defoe.

From the Paper:

"The first thing that must be made clear about Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island is that it is a romance. And therefore the image of the pirate that it paints remains largely fictional, and many of the details will not seem to comply with scholarly evidence of what the typical pirate was like in its heyday. But it is not correct either to interpret romance as being false history in all instances. When romance is derived from vibrant and native mythology then it is likely to contain a large measure of truth, and the sort of truth that scientific scholarship cannot detect. According to Mircea Eliade, myth, when it is vitally connected to the culture, speaks only of realities, which are far more "real" than mere "hard facts" (7)."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Burl, Aubery. Black Barty: The Real Pirate of the Caribbean. Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing, 2006.
• Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. New York: Waveland Press, 1998.
• Kingsley, Charles. At Last. Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2007.
• Lane, Kris E. Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500-1750. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998.
• Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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