The Sea Story in the Fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad, 1881-1917

Although Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad are rarely examined as writers of sea fiction, either individually or collectively, their work written during the period 1881 to 1917 was instrumental in establishing them as the pre-eminent exponents of the form in the history of British literature. The following study assesses their ability as serious maritime authors, examines their response to the artistic problems posed by the sea story, and sets their achievement against the popular nautical fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.