Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Constructing the imperial subject: nineteenth-century travel writing
- 2 Adventure fiction: a special case
- 3 Them and us: a useful and appealing fiction
- 4 The shift toward subversion: the case of H. Rider Haggard
- 5 Travel writing and adventure fiction as shaping discourses for Conrad
- 6 Almayer's Folly
- 7 An Outcast of the Islands
- 8 The African fictions (I): “An Outpost of Progress”
- 9 The African fictions (II): “Heart of Darkness”
- Coda
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Constructing the imperial subject: nineteenth-century travel writing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Constructing the imperial subject: nineteenth-century travel writing
- 2 Adventure fiction: a special case
- 3 Them and us: a useful and appealing fiction
- 4 The shift toward subversion: the case of H. Rider Haggard
- 5 Travel writing and adventure fiction as shaping discourses for Conrad
- 6 Almayer's Folly
- 7 An Outcast of the Islands
- 8 The African fictions (I): “An Outpost of Progress”
- 9 The African fictions (II): “Heart of Darkness”
- Coda
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In 1891, the year after Kipling returned from India to London, Joseph Conrad spent most of his time in hospital recovering from the Congo. Stevenson's works The Wrecker and In the South Seas were published that year, as was “Mr. Kipling's Stories,” an essay by Andrew Lang, himself a prominent writer/critic and one-time collaborator with H. Rider Haggard. In this essay, Lang wrote appreciatively of the new adventure literature:
There has, indeed, arisen a taste for exotic literature: people have become alive to the strangeness and fascination of the world beyond the bounds of Europe and the United States. But that is only because men of imagination and literary skill have been the new conquerors – the Corteses and Balboas of India, Africa, Australia, Japan, and the isles of the Southern Seas. All such conquerors, whether they write with the polish of M. Pierre Loti, or with the carelessness of Mr. Boldrewood, have, at least, seen new worlds for themselves; have gone out of the streets of the over-populated lands into the open air; have sailed and ridden, walked and hunted; have escaped from the fog and smoke of towns. New strength has come from fresher air into their brains and blood, hence the novelty and buoyancy of the stories which they tell.
(Lang, Essays, p. 200)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition , pp. 8 - 38Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993