EDU21ACL – Australian Children’s EDU21ACL – Australian Children’s LiteratureLiterature

Adventure Adventure StoriesStories

Lecture 2

Historical and Critical

elements in Adventure Stories

© La Trobe University, David Beagley 2006

Origins and development

• To early 19th century - children’s stories are primarily didactic (i.e. teaching tools for moral and social virtues)

• Early-mid 19th century - Adult adventure stories are popular with children: Swiss Family Robinson (1814), Ivanhoe (1820), Last of the Mohicans (1826) - styles are established

• Leads to publication of many stories in serial form in magazines

• Mid-late 19th century - genre (and market) embraced: The Silver Skates (1865), Tom Sawyer (1876), Black Beauty (1877), Treasure Island (1883), Heidi (1884), Huckleberry Finn (1884), King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Kidnapped (1886), The Jungle Books (1894-5)

• Authors become famous, with appreciative audience: Twain, Ballantyne, Marryat, RL Stevenson, Kipling, Rider Haggard

Origins and development

Key aspects established:• Gender: boy heroes going out into wider world, girls have domestic adventures

• Social values impressed: o Imperialism - civilized European dealing

with the primitive exotico Personal worth -

honesty, loyalty, pluck in face of danger (for boys) caring, nurturing, home building (for girls)

o Reward is earned by the successful application of those values to achieve the adventure’s resolution

In essence - Growing up

Origins and development

• Key aspects continue and develop into 20th century

• Popular stories and characters evolve into series:

• Stratemeyer syndicate (USA) - Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys

• School stories (UK) - Billy Bunter, Malory Towers, Hogwarts

• Characters/settings/series - Biggles, Famous Five, Secret Seven, Simon Black, Billabong

• Note little change in gender roles, personal values, Eurocentric politics

• But, later 20th century – social realism and issues become increasingly important plot elements

Gender roles – 19th century

• Boys get Kidnapped, girls get Green Gables

• Boys go out into the world to encounter their adventures

• Girls stay home and have the adventures come to them

• Thus, as the nature of the adventure is largely determined by the setting, it is therefore determined by the gender role

• Boys active and exploratory, girls passive and domestic

• Little House(s), Railway Children, 7 Little Australians, Heidi, Little Women, Pippi Longstocking

Gender roles – 19th century

• A mixture of the extraordinary and the probable•if the events in a story are too mundane, they fail to excite, but a sequence of completely extraordinary events fails to be credible (Butts)• The adventure must be within the reach of the reader - it should be possible to believe it could happen to you• As girls were presumed to be domestic, sailing away to a rip roarin’ adventure would be too great a departure from the probable – a girl doing a Huck Finn would be almost unthinkable• Femaleness exists as an extension of maleness – male “protector” is always nearby

Gender roles

• Children’s books were (and are still?!) seen as a mechanism to teach appropriate social values

• The values required by the hero to achieve the resolution are those deemed socially ideal

• This makes the adventure story the prime focus of the “appropriateness” argument

Gender roles – 20th century

Gender roles change (Female suffrage, WWI and workforce, roaring 20s etc.)Therefore literary representations of gender change:• Girls’ school stories – jolly hockey sticks!• Mixed, but equal, gender groups – F5, S7• Girls questioning the boundaries set for them – Biggles/Worrals, George of F5• Solo female heroes and leaders – Nancy Drew, Carolyn Keene, Ellie• But constraints still there – Cherry Ames, Hazel Green (vs Bartlett), Hermione Grainger …

Politics and world views – 19th century

Early adventures as Mechanisms of Empire• Exotic settings far away from “civilization”

• Includes Australian bush• “Different” cultural & ethnic groups (primitives) encountered and opposed

• Hero/protagonists as agents of Empire (civilization), using their superior skills to subdue the “primitive”

The exotic other – people and places

Politics and world views – 20th century

Imperial dichotomy replaced by other political oppositions:

• Other imperial powers (foreign agents)• The Cold War• Non-Europeans still distrusted

• Internal social class becomes a defining element, often linked to crime: working class/middle class, urban/rural

• Marxist social view

Politics and world views – 21st century

Key political elements still direct representation

• Globalization – other cultures and societies now more familiar and given integrityNot necessarily a European going into the exotic• Parvana – Afghanistan• The Heaven shop - Africa• Chinese Cinderella

• But the focus is on social negatives – war, famine, AIDS – in those non-European societies

• Social dislocation – urban problems such as homelessness, crime, unemployment or personal disasters such as pregnancy, drugs, abuse

• Have fantasy worlds become the new exotic?

Social Issues and Realism

• Late 20th century saw sudden expansion of “acceptable” topics in children’s literature

• Judy Blume Forever (1976), Robin Klein Came back to show you I could fly (1985), Sonya Hartnett Sleeping Dogs (1995)

• Is children’s literature the place for warts’n’all reality?

Protection (shield them from the nasties, they will get enough later)

vs Vaccination (finding out from the safety of a book prepares them to face reality)

Social Issues and Realism

Children’s Literature vs Young Adult/Teen literature – where and what are the boundaries?

What is Adventure?• Does it require:

• Action ?• Violence and conflict ?• Danger and threat ?

• Overt or implied ?• Should it question or answer?