“Intertextual Stevenson” is evidently a rich (and under-explored) field, which is why it was chosen as the topic of a conference held at Ruhr University Bochum in June 2024, organised by Lena Linne and Burkhard Niederhoff. The conference topic was understood very broadly by the participants. “Text” was not limited to strings of words; there were papers on illustration and film. “Intertextual” was likewise not defined in a restrictive manner. Using the terminology proposed by Gérard Genette, it included intertextuality in the narrow sense (the selective use of another text, as in allusion and quotation), hypotextuality (a rewriting of an entire text, as in parody), architextuality (the affiliation of a text with a genre and thus with many other texts of the same sort) and metatextuality (the explicit reference of one text to another). Some participants pointed out Stevenson’s “autotextuality,” his tendency to echo and rewrite his own works; others explored his “interdiscoursivity,” a recourse not to specific texts or genres but to more generally defined discourses (this concept can be related to “A College Magazine” and the way Stevenson imagines mature writers knowing their “literary scales” or discourses, with “legions of words” and “dozens of turns of phrase” at their disposition). A selection of articles based on the papers given at the conference have now been published in Connotations.

From: Lena Linne and Burkhard Niederhoff, “Intertextual Stevenson: A Brief Introduction”