Reading adventure, reading empire, reading 1884

This disparation examines "adventure" as both genre of gendered fiction and rhetorical trope in the language, history, and literature of the British Empire in 1884, the year of the scramble for Africa, the Berlin Conference, and the publication of a number of important documents of empire. Contemporaneous gendered adventure fiction, often discussed as children's fantasy, included Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), Henry's With Clive in India (1884), and Haggard's King Solomn's Mines (1885), texts I use to trace extensions of imperialist ideology into the late twentieth century. My thesis is that "adventure," as both literary genre and universalist trope, determines behaviour by organizing knowledge about the world, negotiating between rhetorical constructions in language in many social discourses at the centre of empire and the violent practices in the imperial periphery.;Part One reads the three gendered adventure novels by Stevenson, Henry, and Haggard, foregrounding traditional formalist and sociological criticism. Part Two discusses Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (1993) and Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (1987) to formulate a materialist strategy for reading of adventure, indicating limitations in their admirable opposition to imperialism from within the New World Order. Part Three consists of three chapters organized around the concept of 1884 as "emblematic date": Chapter Three reads the entry on "adventure" in the Oxford English Dictionary (1884); Chapter Four critiques the naturalizing strategies in imperialist historiography that associate adventure and empire unproblematically in Seeley's The Expansion of England (1883), the biographies of General Charles Gordon; and William Morris's socialist lectures of 1884. Chapter Five discusses adventure in both the art-of-fiction debates (1884) involving Henry James, Walter Besant, Stevenson, and others, and also in the commodification of Homer's Odyssey to the needs of Victorian imperialism in the travel writings of J. A. Froude, tracing political and aesthetic continuities between Victorian codes of adventure and three Cold War translations of the Odyssey. Part Four (Chapter Six) reads these late Victorian adventure codes projected into the New World Order in popular culture, such as in advertizing and the periodical press, in contemporary literary discourse, such as current literary handbooks, and in literary criticism.;I read "adventure" dialectically, in the tension between high and popular cultural and literary norms, defining it in relation to late Victorian ideologies of empire and the New World Order, drawing on feminist, post-colonial, and post-structuralist methodologies.