Robert Stevenson’s Children Poetics In A Child’s Garden Of Verses

Robert Louis Stevenson is a celebrated Scottish novelist, one of the greatest novelists in the 19 th century, who is famous for adventure novels with originality and dramatic power, such as Treasure Island, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde etc. Meanwhile, he is a poet although this identity is rather unfamiliar to the public. In fact, A Child’s Garden of Verses, Stevenson’s anthology of children poetry, has been viewed as the most important poetry for children of the 19 th century. It has been translated into various languages and has become one of the best sellers in poetry for children.This thesis tries to analyze children’s horizons of expectation through a combination of Hans Robert Jauss’s Horizons of Expectation with knowledge of children’s psychology. Based on children’s horizons of expectation, it conducts a textural analysis of A Child’s Garden of Verses and studies Stevenson’s children poetics. The whole thesis consists of six chapters, among which Chapters Three, Four and Five are the main body of this paper. The three main chapters analyze Stevenson’s poetics in A Child’s Garden of Verses from aspects of children’s pleasure, children’s fancy, and children’s narrative respectively. Chapter Three analyzes children’s innocent pleasure from their play, curiosity and exploration, so as to unfold their own amusement before readers. Pleasure is a feature of Stevenson’s children poetics, and children’s poetry should head for happiness according to Stevenson. Chapter Four describes children’s fancy. Children in Stevenson’s poems are unconstrained thinkers, whose thoughts, because of their limited cognitive ability, are illogical but naive with a sense of innocent romance. Stevenson’s children poetics is replete with children’s fancy from child readers’ horizons of expectation, and this kind of innocent fancy is necessary for children’s poetry. Chapter Five expounds children’s narrative. In this chapter, Stevenson’s childlike narrative style, including childlike language, rhymelike musicality and tender moralism, is analyzed. This is also a feature of Stevenson’s children poetics.The whole collection of Stevenson’s poems reflects a combination of children’s psychology and horizons of expectation. It is child-centered, analyzing children’s horizons of expectation based on children’s psychology. The poet constructs a poetic Garden for his child readers, which is filled with children’s pleasure, romantic fancy, dulcet nursery rhyme and happy education. The nature of children is vividly presented in his poems. Stevenson is composing poems and expounding children as well. This reflects an innocent children poetics, which is also characterized by imitation, the imitation of children, and by poetics of pleasure and acception. On this basis, this thesis puts forward “children poetics” and tries to give it a definition, which is hopefully an innovation in selected topic. Furthermore, this paper tries to achieve an innovation in theory to conduct a textual analysis through the combination of children’s psychology and horizons of expectation. During the analysis, substantial examples are taken from the text, which deepens the understanding of Stevenson’s poetry and enriches the researches into Stevenson.