Adventure Novel

Abstract

In discussions of the British adventure novel, critics tend to cast their eyes back to one of its earlier examples, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), or towards its flourishing later in the nineteenth century in works by R.M. Ballantyne, G.A. Henty, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, and Joseph Conrad. The Romantic period, however, offers a unique glimpse into the changes in British society – including its movement from a colonial power to an imperial power – that are reflected in generic and thematic changes in adventure tales themselves. Indeed, the popularity of adventure novels can be connected with the popularity of the accounts of voyages, by James Cook and others, which opened British eyes to exotic lands and people and promoted British scientific and mercantile pursuits. Though at its core the adventure novel takes the reader far from home (either in time or space) and usually focuses on the development of a male hero, the richness of this genre cannot be captured so simply. Further, because the adventure novel marks an intersection between different genres of prose writing – including travel writing, missionary accounts, explorer narratives, children's fiction, didactic fiction, and the romance – prominent forms of adventure fiction manifest the generic options within Romantic‐era fiction.