“Identities in Transition: Hybridism in R. L. Stevenson’s Colonial Fiction”

This paper intends to analyze the idea of hybridity in late Victorian colonial fiction, considering it as the complex result of contrasting intellectual forces. By moving on the parallel fields of culture and literature, I will argue that the imperial “other” was, despite ideological and intellectual manifestations of intolerance and repulsion, an integral part of domestic life, and represented a fruitful opposition to the well-established, urbanized, social self. To this end, R. L. Stevenson’s short story The Beach of Falesà will be read as a narrative moving between the two axiological opposites of peremptory colonial authority and unspoken alliance with the natives, disclosing a new white individual identity apparently built on ideological immobility but actually relying on cultural and intellectual dynamism.