Genre:

Regular Feature, Review

Publications reviewed:

Stevenson 1886

Subjects:

Experimental Psychology, Science Fiction, Anti-Scientism, Soul

    Claims that Robert L Stevenson's 'new romance [...] follows the lines explored by Mr. Edward Bellamy in his romance of Miss Ludington's Sister', which 'supposed several selves in each human being, which died successively and became capable of meeting one another in a different state of existence' (972). Also contends that the 'danger' of prose writing is 'that of being more and more engrossed by science. Witness, for example, the scientific preoccupations which Zola has introduced into the novel. It is true that if science ever comes to be complete, if it ever goes to the bottom, to the soul of things, if the broken fragments it now gives us are ever assembled, it will be poetry, as it was in the time of Dante' (975).

Reprinted:

Howells 1891