Mapping Men & Empire
Subtitle: A Geography of Adventure
Publisher: Routledge
Published: December 6, 1996
Language: eng
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780415137720
First sentence: Among the books of travel and discovery published in the modern period, none has made a greater impression on geographical imaginations than Robinson Crusoe, the single most famous, representative and influential adventure story of the time.
Description: Adventure stories, produced and consumed in vast quantities in eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, narrate encounters between Europeans and the non-European world. They map both European and non-European people and places. In the exotic, uncomplicated and malleable settings of stories like Robinson Crusoe, they make it possible to imagine, and to naturalise and normalise, identities that might seem implausible closer to home.

They make it possible to map new forms of masculinity, as writers such as Robert Ballantyne sought to do. At the same time, adventure stories chart colonies and empires, projecting European geographical fantasies onto non-European, real geographies, including the Americas, Africa and Australasia.

But beneath the map-like realism of adventure stories, there is an undercurrent of ambivalence. Adventure's geography is more fragile and also more fluid than it first appears. While adventure stories map, they also unmap geographies and identities, destabilising and sometimes recasting them.

The ambivalent geography and politics of adventure are illustrated in late-Victorian and Edwardian girls' stories, in which boundaries between masculinity and femininity are blurred, and in contemporaneous stories by Jules Verne, which can be read as anarchist adventures.