REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Volume 37

Adventure fiction often seems embarrassing, and sophisticated readers dismiss it as a juvenile indulgence, full of clichés, silly heroes, and cheap thrills, i.e. formulaic genre fiction which literary culture and academic discourse leave behind. And yet, this volume demonstrates, adventure has never really left the scene. The pleasures of adventure tales may be perilous but carry on – and are being carried, not just into adult life, but also into modern and contemporary literature where they serve, sometimes in secret but often rather openly, as forceful drives and forms to work with. This volume takes a decidedly literary interest, focussing on the residues, rewritings and/or reappropriations of adventure tales in anglophone literature since their eighteenth-century heydays, through Victorian and modernist times up to present-day realisations in postmodern and postcolonial writing.