Mapping Men and Empire

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 peoples and places. Robinson Crusoe maps a white, male, Christian, middle-class adventurer - a vision for Britain - and it maps a petit-bourgeois , settled island with a white master and a black slave - a vision for British colonialism. Exotic, malleable, uncomplicated settings serve to neutralise and normalise constructs, that seem implausible in more immediately familiar, textured settings. Victorian boys story writers such as Robert Ballantyne, map hegemonic masculinities, notably Christian manliness, and imperial geographies, including particular colonies. But beneath the superficial realism of adventure stories there lies an undercurrent of ambivalence, which makes adventures' maps more fragile than they appear. While adventure stories map, they also unmap geographies and identities, destabilising and sometimes recasting them. The ambivalenct geography and politics of adventure is illustrated in late-Victorian and Edwardian girls stories, blurring contemporary distinctions between "masculine" and "feminine" spaces and identities. The ambivalent geography of adventure has potential to be a site of resistance - writers have reentered the geography of adventure as a metophorical space in which to challenge the identities and geographies it once mapped. The geography of adventure is a fluid, ambiguous, liminal space, a kaleidoscope of geographic images in which people and places are continuously mapped, unmapped and remapped.