Transimperial Negotiations and Cultural Anxieties from the Sensation Novel to the Adventure Story

The sensation novels of the 1860s expressed the anxieties of the age, challenged realism, and sought to revive wonder. Within the transformations of modernity, these novels were read and exchanged across the British Empire. Sensation fiction mixed romance and realism and its sensational elements reflected modern tensions and concerns. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret probed the sources of violence, the cultural measures of sanity, and underscored the transgressions of an oppressed female figure in her search for freedom. Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White likewise challenged cultural certainties, as he observed the expanding popular reading audience. The rise of the adventure story within the imperial designs of colonization expressed a sense of mystery and an encounter with otherness that is interrogated here.

Book Review: Wulf, A. (2015). The Invention of Nature. The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt. The Lost Hero of Science. John Murray Publishers

Andrea Wulf, the author of this magnificent book, was born in India, but spent some years in Germany before moving to England, where she currently resides. For the research done in preparation for this huge project that culminated with the publication of The Invention of Nature, the author has been highly praised in the literary and obviously the scientific world. For the thrilling journey through the years in search of Alexander von Humboldt’s right place among other scientists and discoverers, the avid reader will be in for a unique, geographical, and highly informative trip of a lifetime. Organized in five parts, with a prologue and an epilogue, this biography/adventure story also contains maps, drawings, illustrations, a note on Humboldt’s publications, as well as colorful pictures of various places Humboldt visited during his explorations.

Cold War Fears

This chapter explores the production and reception history of a notable Cold War Soviet thriller, The Dead Season, directed by Savva Kulish, a former cameraman and collaborator of Mikhail Romm and Maiya Turovskaya on a famous documentary about life in the Third Reich, Ordinary Fascism. Kulish’s background and his own Jewish descent prompted him to adopt a highly serious approach to the story of a former Nazi war criminal who is now resident in “a certain Western country.” Rather than an exciting adventure story, the film became an exploration of psychological tension, as the discussion here makes clear.

Genre, History, and the Stolen Generations: Three Australian Stories

This article explores the role that genre plays in fictional depictions of the Stolen Generations (Australian Indigenous children removed from their homes) in three twenty-first-century Australian middle-grade novels: Who Am I?: The Diary of Mary Talence, Sydney 1937 by Anita Heiss (2001) ; The Poppy Stories: Four Books in One by Gabrielle Wang (2016) ; and Sister Heart by Sally Morgan (2016) . It argues that the genres of fictional diary, adventure story and verse novel invite different reading practices and approaches to history, and shape the ways in which the texts depict, for children, the suffering and resilience of the Stolen Generations.

Haunted Oppressors: The Deconstruction of Manliness in the Imperial Gothic Stories of Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle

Building on Patrick Brantlinger’s description of imperial Gothic fiction as “that blend of adventure story with Gothic elements”, this article compares the narrative formula of adventure fiction to two tales of haunting produced in a colonial context: Rudyard Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast” (1890) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Brown Hand” (1899). My central argument is that these stories form an antithesis to adventure fiction: while adventure stories reaffirm the belief in the imperial mission and the racial superiority of the British through the display of hypermasculine heroes, Kipling’s and Conan Doyle’s Gothic tales establish connections between imperial decline and masculine failure. In doing so, they destabilise the binary construction between civilised Western self and savage Eastern Other and thus anticipate one of the major concerns of postcolonial criticism. This article proposes, therefore, that it is useful to examine “The Mark of the Beast” and “The Brown Hand” through a postcolonial lens.

Forest in the Tree

This is a story about trees and fungi connected through a ‘wood wide web’ – told by one tiny fungal spore. A little fungus meets a baby cacao tree and they learn to feed each other. They cooperate with a forest of plants and a metropolis of microbes in the soil. But when drought strikes can they work together to survive? The fourth book in the Small Friends Books series, this science-adventure story explores the Earth-shaping partnerships between plants, fungi and bacteria.

The Verse Romance Homāy o Homāyūn of Ḫwājū Kermānī: a “Love and Adventure Story” or an Allegory of a Spiritual Quest?

This study, after a summary of the verse romance Homāy o Homāyūn by the medieval Persian poet Ḫwājū Kermānī (14th c.), focuses on its rich semantic stratification and casts doubt on its usual classification as a mere “story of love and adventure”. In particular, this analysis attempts to highlight the numerous and consistent “signals” disseminated by Ḫwājū in his work that deliberately intend to direct the reader to a markedly spiritual perspective in which the hero’s journey in search of his beloved becomes an allegorical spiritual quest.