ABSTRACT

Adventure can be read as a radical narrative, the geography of adventure as a space of anarchy and a site of resistance. Both in its general imagery and also in its particular images, adventure is peculiarly adaptable to articulating critical politics. Adventure's realistic images are capable of articulating critical ideas that cannot be expressed in more abstract terms, whether because they are not precisely formulated, because they might be censored, or because they would be less readable, therefore less effective in that form. In their perilous journeys, adventurers depart violently from the world they know, but find something on the other side, survive the ordeal and return to tell the tale. In general, they transgress the margins of the human world and the 'confinements of the human situation' (Zweig 1974: 16). Specifically, they transgress particular boundaries and conventions. For example, a given adventure story may be generally anarchist on one level, or specifically opposed to slavery in British colonies, on another, or both.