Novel, adventure

Abstract

Victorian adventure novels follow the exciting stories of protagonists who pass beyond the reach of a secure and familiar social order into a perilous realm where, by heroically enduring a series of challenges, they demonstrate not only their own virtues but also the potential power of the social order from which they come. Among the most popular literary forms of the nineteenth century, these novels placed themselves at the center of literary controversies – such as disputes over the aims of juvenile literature or over the relative merits of romance and realism – and of wide‐reaching cultural debates, especially those concerned with the meanings of masculinity and the mission of British imperialism. Following the earlier work of Daniel Defoe and Walter Scott, Victorian adventure novelists included celebrated children's authors such as Captain Frederick Marryat and R. M. Ballantyne – and, later, such giants of popular fiction as Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, and Arthur Conan Doyle.