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
10 - Beyond Adventure: Louis Becke
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
Throughout the island world of the Pacific, scattered men of many European races and from almost every grade of society carry activity and disseminate disease.
Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Ebb-Tide’In Rule of Darkness Patrick Brantlinger observes that much late-Victorian and Edwardian writing has an elegiac quality, ‘mourning the loss of adventure, heroism, [and] true nobility’. The late stories of Robert Louis Stevenson and those of Conrad, for example, consistently express the diminution of chances for heroism in the modern world. There is ‘a felt contradiction between trade and the heroic, aristocratic significance of adventure’, resulting in narratives that link together ‘imperial domination, the profit motive, moral degeneracy, parasitism, and ultimately murder or attempted murder’. Brantlinger is describing what amounts to a repudiation of adventure and imperialism from within. In his late stories, such as ‘The Beach of Falesa’ and ‘The Ebb-Tide’, Robert Louis Stevenson is still writing from within the adventure tradition, but the ‘romance’ of Treasure Island has collapsed under the ‘realism’ – and the imperial politics – of life in Samoa. The collapse of the heroic attitude to adventure, and with it the ideology of imperialism, is like the return of the repressed – and the repressed in adventure, as Joseph Bristow observes, is realism.
This final chapter of Writing the Colonial Adventure deals with the apparent collapse of the adventure mode from within as the symptom of a profound malaise in imperialism that would culminate in World War I.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Writing the Colonial AdventureRace, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914, pp. 179 - 196Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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