ABSTRACT
Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the fi nest storytellers in the English language, wrote a novel called The Ebb Tide (1894/2007), together with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, about a character who gets shipwrecked on an island. Marooned with him is a copy of Virgil’s complete works. Stevenson describes how the castaway reads the book incessantly to pass the time. He also tells about something that might be deemed as rather odd. During the reading process, the images of the places and locations that are created in the mind of the castaway are not those that Virgil directly describes in his book, as one might expect, but something completely different. In Stevenson’s words “a phrase of Virgil speaks not so much of Mantua or Augustus, but of English places and the student’s own irrevocable youth” (2007: 2). Expanding on this he writes:
Visions of England at least would throng upon the exile’s memory: the busy schoolroom, the green playing-fi elds, holidays at home, and the perennial roar of London, and the fi reside, and the white head of his father. (2007: 2)
What is happening here? The character in the novel appears to “ignore” or “bypass” the physical locations described by Virgil and somehow replaces them with his own idiosyncratic and fragmented imagery of places, people and events from his own youth; more specifi cally, images of his childhood home and of a primary caregiver. Why does this occur? What process is at work here? Does this also occur when real people read works of literature? These are the questions that I will seek to address in this chapter which will be on the nature of “perception” with regard to mental images that are produced in the minds of people when they read literature. For the sake of ease, I will call this phenomenon Literary Reading Imagery (LRI).
