Prof. Caroline McCracken-Flesher: Stevenson, Wilde, and the West of the Imagination

The Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures cordially invites you to a guest lecture ” Stevenson, Wilde, and the West of the Imagination” by Professor Caroline McCracken-Flesher (University of Wyoming). The lecture will be held on Tuesday 5 November in Room 200 at 14:10. All welcome.

In 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson set out across America. The transcontinental railway had been completed only ten years before, and Stevenson imagined himself following the westward march of empire. The America he experienced, however, was not what he expected. For him and for writers like Isabella Bird and Oscar Wilde, the American west challenged the codes of genre. As John Wesley Powell had discovered when he rafted and mapped the Colorado River in 1869, this unknown landscape exceeded expression.