Genres 1700-1900: Adventure Novel: Defoe to Stevenson

The European novel of the 18th and 19th centuries is generally understood as embracing new, realistic depictions of middle-class life in opposition to the elements of romance and fantasy prominent in previous literature. Yet from its origins the novel also remains committed to adventure: consider, for instance, Daniel Defoe's 1719 Robinson Crusoe, which critics identify as one origin point for the new focus on details of everyday life, but which also functions as an adventure tale. In this class, we will begin with Crusoe and read other novels in the adventure tradition--Emily Brontë's 1847 Wuthering Heights, Jules Verne's 1872 Around the World in Eighty Days, and Robert Louis Stevens' 1889 The Master of Ballantrae--asking how their adventure elements both work in concert with their realism and do things that realism cannot, and how reading them can expand our understanding of literary history and literature itself. For instance, while the realist novel generally focuses on and explores the nation, all of these books feature depictions of foreign travel or at least (in the case of Wuthering Heights) invocations of it. We will end the class by reading Esi Edugyan's 2018 novel Washington Black, asking how and why the contemporary Canadian novelist Edugyan draws upon this earlier adventure tradition to depict the story of a man who escapes from slavery in early nineteenth-century Barbados.