ABSTRACT
Recent considerations of those texts in fact abound in documentation of their contrary natures. In her reappraisal of the nineteenth-century’s “Golden Age” of children’s literature, for example, Marah Gubar indicts Treasure Island for being “a two-faced text that alternately exalts Jim to heroic status and undermines his achievements.”2 Similarly, Andrew Loman insists that the novel is “two texts at
once, both imperial romance and anti-imperial critique,”3 while Troy Boone also maintains that the text “encourages us to read from two perspectives,” suggesting that the novel tries to dismiss the threat of working-class resistance while bolstering imperial ideology.4 Even as critics increasingly unearth the novel’s social, class, imperial, economic, and other political underpinnings, however, they contend with Stevenson’s own claims for the novel as a romantic adventure story that merely fulfills “youthful day-dreams,” fostering their “building up and circumstantion.”5
