Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure Book

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.Read More