Mapping Men and Empire Geographies of Adventure

The heroes of adventure fiction have led readers through distant discoveries and exotic encounters for over three centuries. But where exactly have they taken us and what have they shown?

Produced and consumed in vast quantities from the eighteenth through the twentieth-centuries, adventure stories map both European and non-European peoples and places. "Robinson Crusoe" maps a white male, Christian, middle-class adventurer -- a vision for Britain -- and a petit-bourgeois, settled island with a white master and a black slave -- a vision for British colonialism. These exotic yet uncomplicated settings serve to neutralize and normalize constructs that seem implausible in more immediately familiar settings. But beneath the superficial realism of adventure stories there lies an undercurrent of ambivalence, which makes adventures' maps more fragile than they appear.

First published in 1996. Adventure stories, produced and consumed in vast quantities in eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, narrate encounters between Europeans and the non-European world. They map both European and non-European people and places. In the exotic, uncomplicated and malleable settings of stories like Robinson Crusoe, they make it possible to imagine, and to naturalise and normalise, identities that might seem implausible closer to home. This book discusses the geography of literature and looking at where adventure stories chart colonies and empires, projecting European geographical fantasies onto non-European, real geographies, including the Americas, Africa and Australasia.

Introduction; Part 1 Mapping Adventures; Part 2 Mapping Men; Part 3 Mapping Empire; Part 4 Ambivalence in the Geography of Adventure; Part 5 Reading and Resistance; Part 6 Unmapping Adventures; Part 7 Conclusion;

Richard Phillips is lecturer in Geography, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.