| While the Victorian adventure story has often been seen as a vehicle designed to speed the British imperial mission of the latter half of the nineteenth century, careful study reveals many points at which the genre sidetracks, or even stalls, colonial desire. That is, authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others design and deploy the adventure tale in a variety of different ways and for a multiplicity of reasons, some of which operate at odds in the same work---a novel such as King Solomon's Mines, for example, can be brazenly racist and movingly humane in its presentation of its central African characters. It is this dynamism which has preserved the Victorian adventure genre as a popular fiction phenomenon through periods of great technological, political, and social change---even through periods in which, as Virginia Woolf famously proclaimed, "human character changed.".;While post-colonial critics like Edward Said and others have done (and continue to do) a masterful job of exposing the ideology of empire inherent in many adventure tales, less work has been done on the question of how the genre functions outside the scope of the empire hermeneutic. My dissertation, "Still Adventurous: Genre Shifts, Narrative Experiments, and the Legacy of the Late-Victorian Adventure Story," seeks to explore the issue by approaching representative texts of the adventure genre from a variety of critical starting points. It includes a genre study of Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, a narratological study of Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, an examination of epistemology in Doyle's The Lost World, and a discussion of the self-aware adventure story as represented by Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae.. |
