The term ‘adventure’ has been applied to ‘a series of events, partly but not wholly accidental, in settings remote from the domestic and probably from the civilised’ (Green 1979, 23). The breadth of this definition indicates the scope and volume of travel and travel writing that can be read through the lens of adventure.

Adventure is now associated with a branch of tourism, a niche in a growing and crowded market for travel, in a world where few geographical stones appear to remain unturned and where a premium is accordingly placed on the apparently undiscovered and unpredictable. As one anthology and guidebook puts it, ‘Do something different. Escape the everyday. That's the essence of adventure travel – whether you set your sights on the summit of Everest or spend an hour or two wafting about in a hot-air balloon’ (Gray 2008, 6). Adventure travel, encompassing ecotourism and active vacations, has spawned literatures of its own, including guidebooks and niche travelogues such as Online Adventure (http://www.adventure-travel-hut.co.uk/). Adventure travelogues – ranging from chronicles to coffee table books – are exemplified by Mary Dinan's (2014) interviews with ‘intrepid’ travel writers and extracts from their work and Colin Cox's (2009) collection of ‘true adventure stories’ which depict ‘close encounters with armed guards, the Greenland ice cap’ and ‘the Arctic Ocean’.

Modern mass-market adventure literature, though stronger on anecdote than analysis, does sometimes gesture towards its literary history and cultural tradition (Laing 2014). Fodor's Adventure Travel introduces a number of adventurers, ranging from television celebrities to explorers such as Christopher Columbus, Ibn Battuta (1304–68), the ‘amazingly widely travelled Muslim geographer’ (Gray 2008, 6), and Xuanzang (602–44), the ‘Buddhist pilgrim and pioneer of travel writing’ (6).

Some of the diversity of adventure travel is also illustrated through the inclusions on a list of modern British adventure stories, compiled by Arthur Ransome, the author of one such work, Swallows and Amazons (1930). Titles on the list ranged across the spectrum from fiction to non-fiction, encompassing action tales, moral fables, survival stories and psychological adventures. The collection included Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe's 1719 classic), Robert Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1858), ‘the works of Joseph Conrad’ and Richard Hakluyt's compilation of exploration narratives, The Voyages (1598–1600).