Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Romance of Property: Rolf Boldrewood and Walter Scott
- 2 Outlaws and Lawmakers: Boldrewood, Praed and the ethics of adventure
- 3 Israel in Egypt: The significance of Australian captivity narratives
- 4 Imperial Romance: King Solomon's Mines and Australian romance
- 5 The New Woman and the Coming Man: Gender and genre in the ‘lost-race’ romance
- 6 The Other World: Rosa Praed's occult fiction
- 7 The Boundaries of Civility: Australia, Asia and the Pacific
- 8 Imagined Invasions: The Lone Hand and narratives of Asiatic invasion
- 9 The Colonial City: Crime fiction and empire
- 10 Beyond Adventure: Louis Becke
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Romance of Property: Rolf Boldrewood and Walter Scott
- 2 Outlaws and Lawmakers: Boldrewood, Praed and the ethics of adventure
- 3 Israel in Egypt: The significance of Australian captivity narratives
- 4 Imperial Romance: King Solomon's Mines and Australian romance
- 5 The New Woman and the Coming Man: Gender and genre in the ‘lost-race’ romance
- 6 The Other World: Rosa Praed's occult fiction
- 7 The Boundaries of Civility: Australia, Asia and the Pacific
- 8 Imagined Invasions: The Lone Hand and narratives of Asiatic invasion
- 9 The Colonial City: Crime fiction and empire
- 10 Beyond Adventure: Louis Becke
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The adventure tales that formed the light reading of Englishmen for two hundred years and more after Robinson Crusoe were the energising myth of English imperialism. They were, collectively, the story England told itself as it went to sleep at night; and in the form of its dreams, they charged England's will with the energy to go out into the world and explore, conquer, and rule.
Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of EmpireWriting the Colonial Adventure concerns the discursive construction of race, gender and nation in Anglo-Australian fiction during the period 1875 to 1914. My starting point is the simultaneous emergence in Britain, from the 1870s, of the New Imperialism and a revived form of romance, the novel of imperial adventure. It was the task of the New Imperialism as an ideology and the adventure novel as an ideological form to resolve contradictions in the lived experience of imperialism, usually by inscribing the male reader in tales of regenerative violence on the colonial frontier. Australia was not simply waiting as a subject to be exploited by writers of the new romance. From the 1870s down to 1914, Australia, along with India, Africa and the Islands was actively constructed as a preferred site of adventure, with all the ethical and political ambiguity that the term adventure came, almost immediately, to imply. In Writing the Colonial Adventure I examine the consequences of thinking about Australia and the Pacific as places where such adventure was possible for English people.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Writing the Colonial AdventureRace, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995