Adventures in a Man’s World: The Victorian Adventure Story

One of the most popular late nineteenth fictional forms was the adventure story, often set in the wilds of empire. In the words of Elaine Showalter, these were training manuals: ‘little boys who read become men who rule.’ In these talks we will explore with the explorers—in novels and stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Rider Haggard, Andrew Lang—and uncover the assumptions of the adventure narrative.