Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Award-winning popular culture scholar and expert, Gary Hoppenstand, assembles a collection of essays published over the past few decades that examine a vast array of popular adventure fiction. Some of the most famous novels in all of popular fiction are featured in these essays, such as Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel and Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood. Hoppenstand examines the cultural and literary impact of these great works of entertainment, often presenting forgotten classics in a new light. Informative analysis offers the interested reader of popular fiction important insights into the adventure story of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in American and British literature.]
Synopsis
Adventure fiction is one of the easiest narrative forms to recognize but one of the hardest to define because of its overlap with many other genres. This collection of essays attempts to characterize adventure fiction through the exploration of key elements--such as larger-than-life characters and imperialistic ideas--in the genre's 19th and 20th century British and American works like The Scarlet Pimpernel by Orczy and Captain Blood by Sabatini. The author explores the cultural and literary impact of such works, presenting forgotten classics in a new light.