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Adventure Novels — Babel Nexus Index

Literature / The Romance of Action & the Far Horizon

A Level II literature chamber of the Babel Nexus Index · 21 primary public-domain works.

What Adventure Novels argues

  • This is the hexagonal gallery of the Adventure Novel — the literature of action, peril, and the far horizon. From a man alone on a desert island to a swordsman in the king's service, from buried pirate gold to a lost world of dinosaurs, these are the books that send their heroes out past the edge of the map and dare the reader to follow.
  • The form runs from Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), the castaway who built a world from a wreck, through Scott's medieval Ivanhoe and Dumas's swashbuckling Musketeers and Count of Monte Cristo, to the high noon of the genre in Stevenson's Treasure Island and Kidnapped, Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, and Anthony Hope's Prisoner of Zenda.
  • By the turn of the century it had split into a dozen strands: Jack London's wilderness of the Klondike (The Call of the Wild, White Fang), the lost-world romance of Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs, the cape-and-sword adventure of Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel and Sabatini's Scaramouche, and the boys'-book legend of Pyle's Robin Hood.
  • Each card carries an authentic public-domain portrait of its author. All eighteen works are in the public domain.

Primary works in Adventure Novels (21)

Chambers connected to Adventure Novels

  • First Novels — The adventure novel is the novel at its most popular and propulsive. It descends straight from Defoe's Robinson Crusoe — often called the first English novel — and keeps the form's appetite for incident, character, and the whole wide world.
  • Epics — Adventure is the epic in prose. The voyage, the quest, the hero tested far from home — the deep pattern of the Odyssey survives in Treasure Island, the Count of Monte Cristo, and the lost-world romance.
  • First Science Fiction and Proto Science Fiction Stories — The scientific romance grew out of the adventure novel. Verne's voyages extraordinaires, Doyle's Lost World, and Burroughs's prehistoric Caprona are adventure stories that step one pace beyond the known into science fiction.