Mapping Men and Empire

This volume looks at how adventure stories, produced and consumed in vast quantities in 18th- to 20th-century Europe, map both European and non-European peoples and places. However, such stories also had the effect of unmapping geographies and identities, destabilzing and sometimes recasting them. First published in 1996. 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 people and places. In the exotic, uncomplicated and malleable settings of stories like Robinson Crusoe, they make it possible to imagine, and to naturalise and normalise, identities that might seem implausible closer to home. This book discusses the geography of literature and looking at where adventure stories chart colonies and empires, projecting European geographical fantasies onto non-European, real geographies, including the Americas, Africa and Australasia.