Romancing the Novel: Adventure from Scott to Sebald

Romancing the Novel examines the ways in which romance forms characteristic of boys' books - as exemplified in the novels of Scott, Dumas, Verne, and Stevenson - influence narratives not generally put in the same category - both psychoanalytical accounts of the psyche and novels by authors as diverse as George Eliot, Ursual Le Guin, Joseph Conrad, and W. G. Sebald. Adventure has been most recently studied largely as a symptom of imperialism's ideological apparatus. But as an intensely familiar story available from the earliest reading, adventure conditions the narratable - its influence is felt from the nursery bed to the analyst's couch. By reading Maurice Sendak with Melanie Klein and Peter Rabbit with Daniel Deronda, Romancing the Novel argues that the power and depth of the generic constraints of the adventure form have not been recognized simply because they are so ubiquitous. Adventure fiction is not merely summer reading whose ephemeral effects dissipate, but rather a pervasive code that exerts powerful effects on the imaginable.