Adventure Narratives Research Articles

Between the Ice Floes: Imaging Gender, Fear and Safety in Antarctic Literature for Young Adults

Ever since first imagined as a site of adventure, discovery and conquest, Antarctica, the southernmost continent, has continued to act as a powerful geographical metaphor for physical, mental and emotional transformation and transubstantiation. The discursive representation of its desolate, ice-bound landscape and its iconic creatures in image and text is a familiar one. The transmedial representation of the heroic explorer walking out into the white unknown in search of international fame and glory, and ultimate death, is even more a familiar. Antarctic adventure narratives for young adult readers have routinely centred on the male hero as the continent's sole mythic figure. The gendering of the ice, and society's growing concern with environmental sustainability, and the ethics of ecological ownership and resource depletion has resulted in a reframing of this gendered determinism. As a consequence this sub-genre of adventure literature is shifting to accommodate this new environmental perspective. The outcome is a strategic rearranging of heroic types and ironic critique of the passions and utopian ideals informing early narratives of Antarctic exploration and discovery.

‘Places to Which I Have Never Been’: Don Quixote, the Childhood Imagination, and English-Language Adaptations for Young Readers

Children’s booksellers began to distil from translations of Cervantes’ novel a core set of episodes for young readers in the late eighteenth century, although earlier chapbook versions had doubtless fallen into the hands of literate children. Quixote quickly became an established figure in the English-language children’s canon; Charles Dickens was not alone in retaining a strong visual memory of his childhood reading of the would-be knight’s illusory conquests. This paper identifies, with reference to Appleyard’s (1991) developmental study of children’s reading, the qualities of Quixote’s adventures — specifically the adventure narrative and comedy — that have always beguiled children, and outlines the context for the emergence of Don Quixote as a children’s text in English. Quixote’s transition from the adult to the children’s library has, of course, been determined by adults seeking to accommodate or mould the child reader. An examination of two of the earliest and selected recent children’s editions reveals the tailoring of narrative perspective in the interests of the young; the expression of various forms of didacticism and the hijacking of the narrative for pedagogical purposes; and, particularly in the last fifty years, the primacy of visual interpretations.A finales del siglo XVIII, los libreros de literatura infantil empezaron a publicar una serie de episodios para jóvenes lectores a partir de las traducciones de la novela de Cervantes, aunque algunas versiones anteriores editadas en pliegos sueltos ya habían caído sin duda en manos de niños alfabetizados. El Quijote se convirtió rápidamente en una figura establecida en los cánones de los niños de habla inglesa; Charles Dickens no fue el único en retener en la memoria las conquistas imaginarias de los aspirantes a caballero que leyó durante su infancia. Este artículo hace referencia al estudio evolutivo sobre lectura infantil de Appleyard (1991) para identificar las cualidades de las aventuras del Quijote — específicamente el relato de aventura y la comedia — que siempre han seducido a los niños, y perfila el contexto de la aparición de Don Quijote como texto infantil en inglés. La transición del Quijote desde las bibliotecas para adultos hasta las infantiles ha estado determinada, sin lugar a dudas, por los adultos que buscan adecuarse o moldear al lector infantil. Un análisis de dos de las primeras ediciones infantiles y de algunas ediciones recientes seleccionadas revela la adaptación de la perspectiva de la narración hacia los intereses de los jóvenes, la expresión de diversas formas de didacticismo, la apropiación de la narración con fines pedagógicos y, sobre todo en los últimos cincuenta años, la primacía de la interpretación visual.

The French Quest for the Silent Car Body

Following Germany's resounding defeat in the First World War, the loss of its status as a colonial power, and the series of severe political and economic upheavals during the interwar years, travel abroad by motor vehicle was one way that Germans sought to renegotiate their place in the world. One important question critical studies of mobility should ask is if technologies of mobility contributed to the construction of cultural inequality, and if so in which ways? Although Germans were not alone in using technology to shore up notions of cultural superiority, the adventure narratives of interwar German motorists, both male and female, expressed aspirations for renewed German power on the global stage, based, in part, on the claimed superiority of German motor vehicle technology.

“The World Is My Domain”

Following Germany's resounding defeat in the First World War, the loss of its status as a colonial power, and the series of severe political and economic upheavals during the interwar years, travel abroad by motor vehicle was one way that Germans sought to renegotiate their place in the world. One important question critical studies of mobility should ask is if technologies of mobility contributed to the construction of cultural inequality, and if so in which ways? Although Germans were not alone in using technology to shore up notions of cultural superiority, the adventure narratives of interwar German motorists, both male and female, expressed aspirations for renewed German power on the global stage, based, in part, on the claimed superiority of German motor vehicle technology.

Discourse of Difference: Rosa Campbell Praed’s My Australian Girlhood

The Australian nationalist metanarrative performed “cultural apartheid” over female literary production. Excluded from official discourse and dominant literary genres, women resorted to those available in an attempt to formulate their subjectivity. Hence, their narratives became a means of talking back. Consequently, Rosa Campbell Praed’s My Australian Girlhood (1902) demonstrates character istics of autobiography, travel literature and adventure narrative, and at the same time transgresses the said genres in both their intent as well as their structural characteristics. Additionally, travelling within the colonial context, Praed inevi tably participates in the discourses of imperialism, which she is, however, found rupturing as she criticises British racial policy in Australia, thus revealing her writing as double-voiced. As a female colonial writer writing within a masculine realist literary tradition, Praed was othered by contemporary critics who either devalued her writing, or altogether dismissed it as un-Australian, ignor ing numerous instances wherein she contributes to the formulation of an 1890s identity. Therefore, to read Praed’s text means to be aware of this historically and culturally specific context.

Untold Tales of the Intra-Suburban Female

Untold Tales of the Intra-Suburban Female

Confronting Genocide: Latin America, adventure fiction and the moral crisis of British imperialism

Adventure fiction was widely employed by British writers during the nineteenth century to address serious questions of politics and morality, particularly those arising from the nation's imperial responsibilities. The nineteenth-century adventure tales that argued for or justified the extension of empire were, in Martin Green's well-worn phrase, 'the energising myth of English imperialism. They were, collectively, the story England told itself as it went to sleep at night, and, in the form of its dreams, they charged England's will with the energy to go out into the world and explore, and conquer and rule/1 By the mid nineteenth century, however, some of these adventure narratives, particularly those set in Latin America, were less likely to bring on a reassuring slumber than they were to engender nightmares of self-doubt before waking the sleeper with a nasty start. At a time when the popular literature of empire was slavishly heroworshipping or blindly propagandists and high culture all but refused to acknowledge the existence of an imperial frontier, adventure fiction set in Latin America furnished a unique critical and intellectual space within which the political, social and moral consequences of empire might be thought through or imaginatively enacted.2 This employment of Latin America in nineteenth and early twentieth-century British adventure fiction grows out of a long-established pattern of discursive relations between the two. J. H. Elliott identifies its precedents in the earliest European responses to the New World. Surveying a wide array of texts from the late sixteenth into the seventeenth centuries, Elliott observes: [I]t is difficult not to be impressed by the strange lacunae and the resounding silences in many places where references to the New World could reasonably be expected. How are we to explain the absence of any mention of the New World in so many memoirs and chronicles, including the memoirs of Charles V himself? How are we to explain the continuing determination, right up to the last two or three decades of the sixteenth century, to describe the world as if it were still the world as known to Strabo, Ptolemy and Pomponius Mela... The reluctance of cosmographers or social philosophers to incorporate into their work the new information made available to them by the discovery of America provides an example of the wider problem arising from the revelation of the New World to the Old. Whether it is a question of the geography of America, its flora and fauna, or the nature of its inhabitants, the same kind of pattern seems constantly to recur in the European response. It is as if, at a certain point, the mental shutters came down; as if, with so much to see and absorb and understand, the effort suddenly becomes too much for them, and Europeans retreat to the half-light of their traditional mental world. There is nothing very novel about the form of this sixteenth century response. Medieval Europe had found it supremely difficult to comprehend and come to terms with the phenomenon of Islam... Nor is this a matter for surprise for the attempt of one society to comprehend another inevitably forces it to reappraise itself. ..This process is bound to be an agonizing one, involving the jettisoning of many traditional preconceptions and inherited ideas. It is hardly surprising, then, if sixteenth-century Europeans either ignored the challenge or baulked at the attempt. There was, after all, an easier way out, neatly epitomized in 1528 by the Spanish humanist, Hernan Perez de Oliva, when he wrote that Columbus set out on his second voyage 'to unite the world and give to those strange lands the form of our own'.3 Elliott's vision of sixteenth-century Europeans dazzled by the prodigality of the New World, retreating to 'the half-light of their traditional mental world' from where they seek to understand 'those strange lands' by imposing on them 'the form of our own', furnishes a key image for the processes determining Britain's cultural relations with Latin America and the persistence of its seemingly perennial ignorance about the continent. …

"And Yet He May Be Our Man": The Cross-Dressing Sailor in Cooper's Early Sea Novels

Jonathan Crimmins, "Nested Inversions: Genre and the Bipartite Form of Herman Melville's Pierre"(pp. 437–464) This essay tracks the development of the cross-dressing sailor as a character over a series of the early sea fictions of James Fenimore Cooper: The Pilot (1824), The Red Rover (1828), and The Water-Witch (1830). The essay argues that Cooper capitalizes on the figure’s literary pedigree as a means to show the conflicted relation between the character’s sentimental conventions and the ways in which nautical adventure and commercial narratives situate her masquerade in context. Not contained by a sentimental narrative, the cross-dressing sailor emerges as a figure of domestic and national estrangement within these novels. In fact, she exposes a series of complicated familial relations that undermine the domestic plot’s fulfillment in marriage as well as the connection between domestic ideology and the growth of antebellum America’s transatlantic economic systems. By first concealing the familial connections that the adventure plot must uncover in order to realize its nationalist objectives, the figure’s unmasking problematically and ironically functions on the level of character resolution. Her ambivalent return to her gender assignment, along with her connection to mobility and maritime commerce, leaves the consolidation of the family unresolved. She remains outside the domestic sphere undermining the novel’s commitment to the republican family.

The Ends of the Earth and the “Heroic Age” of Polar Exploration: A Review Essay

The Ends of the Earth and the “Heroic Age” of Polar Exploration: A Review Essay Katrin Schultheiss (bio) Along with the American Civil War and the Holocaust, polar exploration is one of the few historical topics that are frequently awarded a stand-alone section in chain bookstores. Typically, those shelves are stocked with a mixture of classic, first-hand accounts of now fabled European and American expeditions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, biographies of the leaders of the “Heroic Age” of polar exploration, and adventure narratives of more recent journeys to the ends of the Earth, often undertaken “in the footsteps” of earlier giants. These volumes tend to emphasize the literary elements of dramatic characters, settings, and plots over the more academic concerns of social, political, and cultural context; their target audience is both the general reader of popular history and the more specialized polar-adventure “buff.” In the last decade and a half, however, a few academic studies have found a place among the adventure stories. Focusing on such themes as the relationship between nationalism and science, evolving concepts of the natural environment, changing notions of masculinity, and the applicability of theories of empire to the polar regions, these scholarly works undoubtedly reach a far smaller audience. Yet their presence suggests a new academic interest in the history of the Arctic and Antarctic, an interest spurred no doubt by the current cultural and environmental climate that has made these most remote regions of the world relevant in unprecedented ways. Most obviously, the widespread recognition that global warming has altered and will continue to alter the natural, political, and economic character of the polar regions means that studies of the history of the extreme North and South seem more relevant and less esoteric than they did a few decades ago. Simply put, accounts of past polar exploration describe, often in vivid detail, a landscape and way of life (for both animals and humans) that are rapidly vanishing. As Ken McGoogan writes in his recent Race to the Polar Sea, “All through the twentieth century, historians portrayed the Arctic as a harsh world that hardly changed at all . . . . Suddenly, we realize that this picture is obsolete.” More practically, he notes, accounts of the Arctic “enable us to compare and contrast, and so to appreciate the scale of what is happening in the far North.” With countries like Russia, Norway, Canada, and the United States jockeying for control over the potentially oil- and mineral-rich—and rapidly melting—Arctic Sea, it seems more urgent to understand how earlier territorial disputes were settled and how European and Euro-American encounters with indigenous peoples were handled. Less tangibly, but nonetheless significantly, deepening concern about the environment has spurred a “green consciousness” that has prompted new questioning of humankind’s relationship to nature. The conventional, often competing themes of the literature of polar exploration—of man against nature and man in nature; of man the conqueror of the wilderness and man its victim; of science as the instrument of knowledge and science as the veil covering human destructiveness and hubris—have found a new currency in our present, uncertain age. Since the early 19th century, tales of polar exploration have held a powerful grip on the public imagination, providing hours of vicarious thrills to domestically inclined listeners and readers eager for armchair adventures. English explorer John Franklin’s narrative of his 1819–1822 Arctic expedition was reprinted six times in England and appeared in French, German, and American editions as well. The American Elisha Kent Kane’s two-volume Arctic Explorations sold more than 150,000 copies in several editions after its initial publication in 1853. Robert F. Scott’s The Voyage of the Discovery (1905), Shackleton’s South! (1919), and Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of the disastrous Scott expedition, The Worst Journey in the World (1922), were widely read. Many of these now classic accounts are still in print. Although the number of high-profile expeditions to the polar regions fell off steeply after the First World War, the public appetite for such adventures among European and American audiences has remained strong. Even today, new biographies and reexaminations of famous...

<i>The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination Elizabeth A. Dolan The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination. By Carl Thompson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 299. ISBN 9780199259984. £45.00. In The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination, Carl Thompson explores the ways in which misadventure came to be highly valued in canonical Romanticism. After cataloguing the tropes or 'scripts' inherent in exploration and maritime adventure narratives, Thompson offers a compelling analysis of the implications of these sources for understanding major poems by Wordsworth and Byron. Although he ultimately writes a successful book, Thompson's explanation of his methodology and scope in the introduction is troubling. Defining his historical scope as 1780–1830, Thompson explicitly excludes women authors from consideration, citing as justification Anne Mellor's and Marlon Ross's seminal studies from the late 1980s, both of which identify a 'masculine' agenda within canonical Romanticism. It is puzzling that Thompson does not take into account the extensive body of scholarship of the last twenty years that builds on these early studies to explore the nuances of gender, specifically in travel writing. On the topic of suffering in travel, one thinks, for example, of Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters from Norway, not least because Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom Thompson discusses in connection with Byron, read the travel narrative on his elopement trip with Mary Shelley. To explore Wollstonecraft's text as a 'script' or even anti-script for Shelley's and Byron's traveller personae would serve to deepen rather than to diminish Thompson's argument. In his first chapter, Thompson offers a helpful explication of the term 'tourist' in the Romantic era, cataloguing the types of travellers – Grand Tourists, picturesque tourists and female tourists – with whom the Romantic anti-tourist contrasts himself. The chapter argues that [End Page 182] Wordsworth and Byron signify their radicalism and disdain for these other modes of tourism by travelling on foot and by emphasising their own suffering and discomfort. Thompson then dives into the archive of the Romantic-era 'Voyages and Travels' genre, and here his careful readings and captivating insights engage, educate and entertain the reader. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the existential and political resonances of narratives written by various 'misadventurers', particularly sailors and survivors of shipwrecks. Thompson deftly identifies the rhetorical and interpretive conventions that make up four categories of misadventure narrative: the providentialist's misadventure, in which the hero's salvation, or, alternatively, his suffering, is 'evidence of election'; the empiricist's fragmented observations; the sceptic's account of a random universe; the sentimentalist's focus on the sufferer rather than God. In each case, shipwreck narratives function as sites of exploration for religious contestations and existential anxieties. Likewise, the 'topos of suffering in travel', Thompson argues, offered writers a vehicle through which to express social and political concerns, particularly in their sympathetic identification with figures such as wanderers, vagrants, exiles and, especially, maritime adventurers. Accounts of the hierarchy on board a ship depict civil authority structures, while accounts of mutiny play out resistance to those structures. Shipwreck narratives thus offer a microcosm for analysing political ideals and conflict in an age of revolution. By Chapter 4, one feels oneself in the hands of an excellent historical and intellectual guide, as Thompson describes the 'exploration "mania" [that] gripped British culture in the Romantic period'. Here Thompson builds upon the scholarship of Nigel Leask, Mary Louise Pratt, Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson to analyse the various ways in which the Romantic imagination constructs the figure of the explorer. He identifies objectivism as one of the primary features of the 'house style' of exploration narratives, and elaborates the ways in which narratives by James Bruce and Mungo Park violate this house style with their emotional accounts of disaster, and thus fuel the major Romantic poets' interest in misadventure. The payoff of this archival and historical work comes in the final two chapters, one on Wordsworth's poetry and the other on Byron's. In his careful reading of the Mount Snowdon episode of The Prelude, Thompson identifies a residue of the Providentialist shipwreck narrative. If Wordsworth looks to those who suffer or survive shipwrecks to convey...

The Body out There: The Stakes of Jon Krakauer’s Adventure Narratives

The Body out ThereThe Stakes of Jon Krakauer’s Adventure Narratives Daniel W. Lehman (bio) Reading Jon Krakauer is like shouldering your way through tangled undergrowth toward a stone-cold slab where a body cools. You move carefully; you take your time. You think you’ve been here before: daredevils high on the mountain’s icy face or deep in the Alaskan woods. They hurl themselves against the implacability of nature and are found wanting. Their bodies await you: you already know that. But there’s something more here. Something you sense more than see. You part the branches and look for signs. The writer is out here somewhere: weighing himself against the scale of his task, testing his limits, carving his prose, working his ice ax into the fissures of history. And over there, over that rise, are the readers who have been wounded by his work. The Implications of Nonfiction It was as if there was an unspoken agreement on the mountain to pretend that these desiccated remains weren’t real—as if none of us dared to acknowledge what was at stake here. (Into Thin Air 107) Jon Krakauer’s task is to make these stakes real for his readers. Indeed, we read Krakauer not so much to find out what will happen to his heroes (we already know from the dust jackets of his books that they will die) as to ponder the lessons of their deaths and to breach the veil that normally separates the dead from the undead. Krakauer’s winding narratives draw us toward the bodies in the snow or on the abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness; few readers can resist his invitation to a prolonged gaze at their horror. [End Page 466] Death always sells. But Into Thin Air, Krakauer’s account of the May 10, 1996, blizzard on Mt. Everest that killed eight climbers, and Into the Wild, his story of the Alaskan death of young adventurer Christopher McCandless, also are remarkable for Krakauer’s almost unprecedented willingness to reveal and to second-guess the reporting methods that make his narratives possible. Certainly few best-selling thrillers have made such capital of their indeterminacy. The author discloses the manner by which conflicting evidence robs his stories of certainty, confesses the mistakes he has made as a reporter, and repeats the angry accusations of survivors who have been hurt by his narratives. It’s as if both he and his subjects are risking it all for a payback that will either spell death or recovery. Krakauer’s work thus grows from a conundrum unique to nonfiction: their power depends on a claim to tell the truth about death, even as their premises trouble the foundation on which truth lies. These matters penetrate the heart of the nonfictional transaction and are far less typical of standard forms of fiction. The writer of nonfiction—particularly disaster narratives—gains the power and sanctity that a reader might assign to actual lives in exchange for the responsibility of reproducing those lives in text. While a reliable truth standard may be insufficient to build an unwavering distinction between fiction and nonfiction, the experience of reading the invented and the historical tale is anything but identical. Nonfiction is a form of communication that purports to reenact for the reader the play of actual characters and events across time. What counts is not so much whether the events are historically fixed, but that they also are available to and experienced by readers and subjects outside of the written history. Because both the author and her subjects engage in a contest for meaning in narrative drawn from historical experience, an author who makes a claim that her story is “true” is forced to negotiate her role in reconstructing and telling events. Jon Krakauer seems to understand that responsibility. Indeed, Krakauer shatters the false dichotomy that over the past few years too often has typified discussions about nonfiction. His work proves that scrupulous, in-depth reporting and self-probing memoir can join forces to produce compelling historical narrative. [End Page 467] The Reporter as Character I felt increasingly uncomfortable in my role as a journalist. . . . When they signed up...

(In) Visible Fissures and the “Multicultural American: Interrupting Race, Ethnicity, and Imperialism Through TV's Survivor

One of the longest running reality TV shows, with 15 seasons as of 2007, Survivor is an important text for considerations of race and ethnicity, legacies of imperialism, and the idea of the “multicultural” America. Survivor provides an evolving adventure narrative -one that relies upon the legacies of the past, like colonialism and imperialism, as well as the myths of the present and future, like tourism as a means of survival in a globalized economy. As these imperial contexts are adapted Survivor provides moments for (mostly white or white-identified) privileged, “multicultural” first-world Americans to participate in neo-colonial cultural and economic imperialism and cultural tourism - all from the comforts of our living rooms. While participation in American imperialism and televisual cultural tourism are certainly problematic, such participation can also be disruptive of simplistic notions of American culture, economics, politics, and identities and can tell us much about the ways in which ideas about race are “sold” by the show and interrupted and negotiated by its racialized contestants.

The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (review)

Reviewed by: The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean Pratima Prasad Doris Garraway . The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi + 412. When literary scholars venture into territory that has largely been the province of historians, they tend to adopt a posture of defensiveness. Refreshingly, this is not so in the case of Doris Garraway's The Libertine Colony. Broadening the scope of the literary, Garraway studies representations of the colonial Caribbean from the 1640s to the 1790s in French missionary relations, ethnographies, travel accounts, novels, dictionaries, and adventure narratives. While interdisciplinarity and generic diversity constitute some of the strong suits of the book, its scholarly contribution is more far-reaching. An invigorating and imaginative analysis of creolization in the Ancien Régime French Caribbean, The Libertine Colony traces the centrality of the "roles of desire and sexuality in mediating colonial power relations" (24). Elaborated fully in the last two chapters and arguably most compelling sections of the book, Garraway's central thesis of the "libertine colony" maintains that illicit interracial structures of desire were fundamental to practices of exclusion and domination in the colonial French [End Page 131] Caribbean. Delving into works by Hilliard d'Auberteuil, Baron Wimpffen, and Moreau de Saint-Méry, among others, these two chapters investigate the ties between Saint-Domingue's racially segregated caste system on the one hand, and the persistent networks of desire and sexuality between white men and women of color on the other. Garraway demonstrates the ways in which French discourses on Saint-Domingue repress and displace miscegenation rather than prohibit it, thereby enabling exploitative sexual relationships. Moreover, by projecting the stigma of miscegenation onto the "concupiscent mulatto woman" (233) and other mixed-race subjects, colonial texts legitimate white male desire and sexual power. Like cultural historian Françoise Vergès, who has analyzed French colonialism in the Indian Ocean through the metaphor of the family romance, Garraway offers a persuasive psychoanalytical perspective of sexual politics in the colonial Caribbean. For instance, she locates the fantasy of an incestuous family romance in writings about Saint-Domingue, that is, "evidence of white male desire for both black and mulatto women, whom they imagine as their symbolic daughters" (277). The first three chapters of The Libertine Colony address not so much interracial sexual contact in the Caribbean, but other libidinal economies of colonial desire. Here the discourses of libertinage refer to anxieties in colonial texts about the threatening and uncontrollable nature of the creolizing process. Garraway deftly mines the writings of French missionaries such as Du Tertre, Breton, and Labat, pirate writers like Oexmelin, and Blessebois' novel Le Zombi du Grand-Pérou. These early chapters explore the tensions between violence and desire in French encounters with Island Caribs, early colonists' libertine resistance to the colonial social order, and the erotic subtext in narratives of the spirit world. By all accounts, The Libertine Colony is Garraway's first book-length publication. Yet it has none of the rough edges of a first monograph, reading like the work of a seasoned scholar. Garraway's research is comprehensive, her readings astute, and her approach innovative. The Libertine Colony makes an important critical intervention in the fields of Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, European colonial history, and French and francophone literary criticism. Pratima Prasad University of Massachusetts-Boston Copyright © 2007 L'Esprit Créateur

THE POETICS OF STATE TERROR IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY ZIMBABWE

Zimbabwe's ‘patriotic history’ – the official state ideology of the new millennium – conforms to Achille Mbembe's theorization of a postcolonial ‘master fiction’ as the state's attempt to create its own world of meaning, which seeks to govern the production of all other socially produced meanings. The Zimbabwean master fiction is an accumulation of distinct narrative segments with separate official designations. The takeover of rural farmland (the so-called ‘Third Chimurenga’) was recently followed by an urban supplement – operation Murambatsvina, or ‘sweeping out the filth’. The article is centrally preoccupied with the generic properties of Zimbabwe's master fiction, claiming that in narrative terms it corresponds to what has been called the adventure narrative of ordeal. Furthermore, the current ‘patriotic’ master fiction may be seen to have been anticipated, rehearsed and reinforced by popular adventure novels of ordeal published locally since 1980 and written by authors such as Garikai Mutasa, Edmund Chipamaunga, Rodwell Machingauta, Lilian Masitera and Claude Maredza. The existence of a ‘popular’ public realm that is in contact with the domain of political discourse, with which it may be exchanging textual strategies, helps to explain why the implementation of the current master fiction has been so successful. The article examines the key generic and narrative properties of the Zimbabwean state fiction with reference to both a representative sample of popular novels and non-fictional texts generated by the state.

Zwischen Abenteuer, Wissenschaft und Kolonialismus: Der deutsche Afrikadiskursim 18. Und 19. Jahrhundert by Matthias Fiedler

MLR, I02.2, 2007 597 allows him todefine the social and cultural function of thedebates as one of collective self-assurance or self-definition vis-a-vis the extreme, the abhorrent, the unknown. Those readerswho arewilling to read past some high-brow theory and tolerate some convoluted, quotation-soaked, and occasionally rather inflated language will be re warded with a thrillingjourney into a strange and fascinating area of encounter with extremes and with an enhanced understanding of the attraction inherent in under taking, reporting, and fictionalizing such transgressions. NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, MAYNOOTH FLORIAN KROBB Zwischen Abenteuer,Wissenschaft undKolonialismus: Der deutscheAfrikadiskurs imi8. und I9. Jahrhundert. By MATTHIAS FIEDLER. Cologne: Bohlau. 2005. 30I PP. E34g90. ISBN 978-3-412-I9Io5-4. Since the I990S, postcolonial enquiry inGerman literature,culture, and history has made the rediscovery and re-evaluation ofGerman colonialism and Germany's wider implication in the cultural history of European colonialism a new focus both in Anglo-American German studies, which pioneered this development, and inGer many itself.Fiedler's study,which is based on his doctoral thesis at theUniversity ofGottingen (2004), contributes to the further mapping of this increasingly popular field by critically reviewing the development of Germany's discourse about Africa from theEnlightenment to imperial colonialism around I900 and by offeringvaluable new insight into the crucial role of travelwriting about Africa in the emergence of German colonial discourse. Tracing continuities between eighteenth-century 'colo nial fantasies' (as Susanne Zantop called them) and late nineteenth-century colonial discourse, Fiedler provides furtherevidence ofGermany's full implication in thecul turalhistory ofEuropean colonialism, while also supporting recenthistorical research into the significance of laternineteenth-century colonial discourse for the politics of German national identity both before and during Germany's short-lived colonial empire (I884-19I8). Fiedler's analysis ofboth literaryand non-literary sources illustrates theemergence of a set of tropes in eighteenth-century writing about Africa and Africans (African nature vs. European culture; the 'ugliness' of the black body; African inferiority justifying European guidance; etc.), which continue to inform nineteenth-century literature and travelwriting, while gradually transforming into the colonial ideology of European superiority and African development through European colonization. Fiedler's earliest example is Peter Kolb's account of his residence in South Africa (17I9), which already exhibits the emerging 'colonial gaze' by highlighting theHot tentots' amenability toWestern education (p. 45). In his discussion of Christoph Martin Wieland's fictionalReise des PriestersAbulfauaris ins innere Afrika ( 768), he thenhighlights the dilemma of critical exoticism, sinceWieland critiques Rousseau's concept of the 'noble savage' and exposes the (gendered) violence of colonial conquest, while at the same time reinforcing theEnlightenment's vision of cultural development defined by Europe. The monograph's centrepiece, however, isa detailed discussion of the travel writing by German nineteenth-century explorers inAfrica such as Heinrich Barth, Georg Schweinfurth, Gustav Nachtigal, Gerhart Rohlfs, and Hermann von Wissmann. Fiedler illustrates the crucial role of these publications inpromoting growing public interest inAfrica since the i85os and in shaping the emerging discourse about Ger many's own colonial involvement inAfrica. His discussion also notes a shift in themes and style fromscientificaccounts in thecontext of contemporary geography tocolonial narratives of heroic adventure and conquest. And yet Fiedler finds recurring narra tive tropes (such as the symbolic scenes of departure from themargins of European 598 Reviews civilization into the 'darkcontinent') and a conspicuous reluctance throughout toen gage incross-cultural encounter. German nineteenth-century travelwriting presents Africa as empty landscape or as evidence of preconceived stereotypes about Africans while at thesame timeconstructing theGerman travellers as 'heroes of science' whose achievements compensate for the lack ofGerman colonial power (p. 139). Preparing the ground forGerman colonialism, this type of travelwriting was ultimately to provide some of itsauthors with a career inGermany's emerging colonial empire. Turning to other instances of the increasingly popular colonial discourse about Africa, Fiedler readsWilhelm Raabe's novel Abu Telfan (I865) as a literary reponse to thisdiscourse, a critique ofGerman exoticism and European presumptions of cul tural superiority, but he argues thatRaabe's technique of comparing and contrasting Africa and Germany ultimately reinforces colonial tropes.Wider engagement with relevant specialist research could have helped to take this discussion further.The popular culture shows of the...

Action figures: men, action films, and contemporary adventure narratives

Action figures: men, action films, and contemporary adventure narratives

Soviet Car Rallies of the 1920s and 1930s and the Road to Socialism

Rallying, which originated in France soon after the birth of the automobile, has remained a popular sport in Europe and elsewhere, serving to showcase developments in automotive technology and the skillfulness of professional drivers. These, in addition to demonstrating the variety of road conditions and peoples within the country and choosing the most appropriate vehicle to import, were the main objectives of the all-Russian (1923) and all-Union (1925) rallies(avtoprobegy).But in 1929, hard on the heels of the agreement with Ford to build a car factory in Nizhnii Novgorod, Nikolai Osinskii, president of the Society for Cooperation in the Development of Automobilism and Road Improvement (Avtodor), undertook a journey that inaugurated a new kind of avtoprobeg. Expeditionary rather than sporting, it drew on and reinforced a discursively constructed geography of the Soviet Union, relying on two “moving metaphors“ central to Bolshevik discourse: the storming of fortresses and the road to socialism. The avtoprobegy of the 1930s lent themselves to narratives of adventure and accomplishment not only for the rallyists themselves but also for the peoples through whose lands they traveled. This was especially true of the most publicized road trip in Soviet history—the Moscow-Kara Kum rally of 1933.

Captain Cook and the Discovery of Antartica's Modern Specificity: Towards a Critique of Globalism

Captain Cook and the Discovery of Antarctica's Modern Specificity:Towards a Critique of Globalization Mariano Siskind "Antarctica is the last great journey left to Man" Ernest Shackleton One can affirm that by the end of Captain James Cook's first circumnavigation of the world, in July 1771, almost every region of the Globe had been discovered, explored, charted and was being incorporated into what the colonial powers conceived as the world. There was still Terra Australis Incognita, or the Southern Continent (as Antarctica was referred to), the only space on Earth still absolutely virgin, unexplored, undiscovered. On August 2nd 1773, after having been the first man to cross the Antarctic Circle during the previous summer, but unable to land on Antarctic soil, Cook wrote on his journal about the need for exploring Antarctica and its seas: Having now crossed or got to the north of Captain Carteret's Track [near Tahiti], no discovery of importance can be made, some few islands is all that can be expected while I remain within the Tropical Seas. As I have now in this and my former Voyage crossed this Ocean from 40° sign South and upward it will hardly be denied but what I must have formed some judgment concerning the great object of my researches (viz) the Southern Continent. Circumstances seem to point out that there is none but this is too important a point to be left to conjenctor [sic], facts must determine it and these can only be had [End Page 1] by visiting the remaining unexplored part of this Sea which will be the work of the remaining of this Voyage.1 In fact, as Philip Edwards notices, the precise instructions imparted by the Royal Society for Cook's second global sea travel were to "further discoveries towards the South Pole."2 During the three years that this expedition lasted (1772-1775) he attempted three penetrations into Antarctica, failing each and every time, although he achieved the first crossing of the Antarctic Circle, and reached a more southern point than ever before (71° sign10'S) in the history of navigation. Most importantly, however, he was the first to make modern-scientific observations about Antarctica, which would mark all of the subsequent attempts to explore the White Continent until today. Although omnipresent as scientific topic or as the background for fascinating adventure narratives, Antarctica has not been studied systematically as a problematic nucleus within the history of modernity. This paper will try to articulate a few questions that do not come up in the very few existing critical approaches to this territory: how can Antarctica and the South Poles (the Geographic and the Magnetic South Poles) be incorporated into the study of what Margaret Cohen calls "The Waterways of Modernity"?3 How do the incorporations of Antarctica and the South Poles interrogate our idea of what Modernity is? And, can one think of a specific "Antarctic Modernity," of Antarctica's modern specificity? I will argue that by failing to explore Antarctica, Captain Cook discovered in fact the very specific way in which Antarctica relates itself (critically) to a certain vein of modernity that could be named globalization. Contemporary to Cook's circumnavigations, Immanuel Kant's political writings on the idea of "universal history" and "perpetual peace," and later on, G.W.F. Hegel's developments on "world history" would shape a notion of Modernity as the historical and territorial expansion of reason to the whole world. Kant and Hegel produced the conditions of possibility to conceive the passage from reason considered as a universal attribute, to the universal (global) expansion of that same reason and its objective manifestations, the state and property rights. In other words, what I will call "a genealogy of globalization" begins with the territorial spatialization of the universal premises of modernity: what is conceptually universal must be also geographically universal, global that is. The reconstruction of Antarctica's modern specificity, of the way Antarctica intersects the history of Western modernity (an encounter epitomized in Cook's disappointment), produces a critique [End Page 2] of this "genealogy of globalization," understood as an instance of mediation between the philosophical meditation on modern reason and the economical...

Egypt in Greco-Roman History and Fiction

more than a representation. In his 1971 survey of the subject, C. Froidefond characterized Greek views of Egypt as a mirage, an imaginative vision that had as much to do with who the Greeks were as it had with who the Egyptians were.1 Edward Said's 1978 landmark work on orientalism traced how that Egyptian mirage developed and endured over the years in response to Europe's own evolving identity, and his book made a strong case for what has become a key idea in cultural studies: Power follows knowledge, and the seemingly objective and scientific study of other cultures is often an accessory to the crimes committed by empires in the name of civilization.2 The enormous-and often nasty-controversy that swirled around the publication of Martin Bernal's Black Athena, with its accusation of racism in the conduct of European historiography, particularly in the treatment of the relationship between Europe and Egypt, has dealt a devastating blow to the pose of objectivity in the conduct of scholarship.3 Despite this controversy, or perhaps because of it, the peculiar position of Egypt in the imaginations of the Greeks and Romans and its role in the classical world continue to be a subject of the greatest interest. I wish to contribute to this discussion by looking at the role Egypt plays in the so-called Greek romances, prose narratives of love and adventure that were composed during the Roman empire. I will begin by selectively sketching ideas about Egypt in Greek and Roman letters as a context for my remarks.4

When the going was good: a guide to the 99 best narratives of travel, exploration, and adventure

When the going was good: a guide to the 99 best narratives of travel, exploration, and adventure