ABSTRACT
Although the world of adventure is superficially familiar to readers, who generally find their world views reaffirmed in its bold images and uncomplicated terms, it is not a space in which constructions of identity and geography are wholly stable. For the most part, adventure stories reflect entrenched ways of seeing. Writers such as Ballantyne were content to follow formulae, borrow images - such as stereotypes of Indians and British boys - and respect conventions (A. White 1993). Even the most successful writers of pulp fiction needed to produce several books a year to make a living - usually a hundred or more over the course of a career- and to do this they retold stories and resisted any innovations that might have disrupted sales or taken too long to write. Publishers, too, were content to supply established markets with more of the same, and thereby ensure reliable sales. Partly for these reasons, adventure stories are overwhelmingly conservative. In 1940, George Orwell complained that they were 'censored in the interests of the ruling class' and 'sodden in the worst illusions of 1910' (Orwell 1940: 128). But they are never completely conservative. Masculinities and imperi alisms, for example, are not simply reproduced; they are actively constructed and reconstructed, in the geography of adventure. Labels such as masculinist and imperialist, sometimes applied to adventure, are too static to capture this fluidity, in which masculinities and imperialisms are in constant states of flux.
