The Strange Case of the £800k woke makeover of RLS
HE is arguably Scotland’s most famous storyteller, admired by the likes of Hemingway and Kipling.
But now the works of Robert Louis Stevenson are being reviewed by woke academics searching for ‘colonial stereotypes’.
A public quango is paying more than £800,000 to researchers at the University of Edinburgh to study the way the Victorian author treats indigenous populations in the Pacific Islands.
Part of the project is expected to involve travel to far-off South Sea locations such as Samoa and Hawaii.
Last night, Joanna Marchong, investigations campaign manager at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘Bureaucrats who insist on funding this nonsense should be told to walk the plank.’
The quango UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is paying the university £809,334 for a three-year project entitled Remediating Stevenson: Decolonising Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction Through Graphic Adaptation, Arts Education and Community Engagement. Its website states: ‘Given that educational institutions throughout the world are actively engaged in decolonising their curricula, Stevenson’s work and legacy present a particularly valuable focus of inquiry.’
It said that while the writer treated local people ‘with considerable agency and dignity’, his works include ‘many of the colonial stereotypes typical of fin-de-siècle Western literature’.
The study will cover three short stories published in Stevenson’s 1893 collection Island Nights’ Entertainments: The Bottle Imp, The Isle of Voices – set in Hawaii – and The Beach of Falesá, rooted in Stevenson’s experience of Samoan culture.
Born in Edinburgh in 1850, Stevenson achieved worldwide fame for works such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He died on Samoa in 1894, aged 44.
A spokesman for UKRI said: ‘UKRI invests in a diverse research and innovation portfolio. Decisions to fund the research projects we support are made via a rigorous peer review process by relevant independent experts from across academia and business.’
The University of Edinburgh declined to comment.