Travel writing and engineering: experiential and textual hybridity in the works of David and Robert Louis Stevenson
Résumé
Although travel writing is understood as a hybrid genre, its connections with engineering have rarely been explored. Yet, the increase of mobility over the 19th century resulted from the development of new infrastructures and transportation technologies in the first place. Engineers were the leading actors of these changes; but, as part of their activity, they also turned into travellers and writers of accounts based on their journeys. This chapter examines the boundaries and crossings between literary and engineering genres of travel writing. Cristin focuses on two members of a prestigious line of lighthouse engineers: Robert Louis Stevenson, the popular writer of adventures, and his uncle, David Stevenson, who pursued his career in the family business. In 1837, David completed a tour of North America in order to draw a technological survey of the region. He turned this journey into an account, Sketch of the Civil Engineering of North America (1838), and later relied on his travel experience in other technical writings. Himself trained as an engineer, Robert Louis Stevenson became familiar with the profession’s culture of journeying. An Inland Voyage (1878), his first account as a writer, bears the marks of this engineering background. David and Robert Louis Stevenson’s respective accounts question our definition of travel writing as a category and call for new ways of understanding both technical and literary works.