Adventure fiction is a type of story that often includes dangerous situations or makes readers feel excited. Some adventure fiction also meets the definition of romance fiction used in literature.

History

In the introduction to the Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction, Critic Don D'Ammassa explains the genre as follows:

An adventure is an event or series of events that happens outside the normal life of the main character, often involving danger and physical action. Adventure stories usually move quickly, and the speed of the plot is just as important as other elements like characters, settings, and themes.

D'Ammassa says that danger is the central focus of adventure stories. For example, he argues that Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities is an adventure novel because the main characters face constant danger of imprisonment or death. In contrast, Dickens’s Great Expectations is not considered an adventure novel because "Pip’s meeting with the convict is an adventure, but this scene is only used to help move the main story forward, which is not truly an adventure."

Adventure has been a common theme in stories since the earliest written fiction. One example is the story of Heliodorus, which follows a pattern still seen in modern movies: a hero has a series of adventures before meeting a love interest, then faces separation, followed by more adventures that lead to a final reunion.

Over time, the genre has changed. Starting in the mid-19th century, as more people could read, adventure became a popular type of fiction. Though not always fully explored, adventure stories evolved from tales about knights to stories about high-tech espionage.

Examples of authors from this period include Sir Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas, père, Jules Verne, the Brontë Sisters, Rudyard Kipling, Sir H. Rider Haggard, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Victor Hugo, Emilio Salgari, Karl May, Louis Henri Boussenard, Thomas Mayne Reid, Sax Rohmer, A. Merritt, Talbot Mundy, Edgar Wallace, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Adventure novels and short stories were often featured in American pulp magazines, which were the most popular form of fiction in the United States from the Progressive Era until the 1950s. Magazines like Adventure, Argosy, Blue Book, Top-Notch, and Short Stories focused on this genre. Notable writers of adventure stories in these magazines included Edgar Rice Burroughs, Talbot Mundy, Theodore Roscoe, Johnston McCulley, Arthur O. Friel, Harold Lamb, Carl Jacobi, George F. Worts, Georges Surdez, H. Bedford-Jones, and J. Allan Dunn.

Overlap with other genres

Adventure fiction often shares features with other types of stories, including war novels, crime novels, detective novels, sea stories, Robinsonades, spy stories (such as those written by John Buchan, Eric Ambler, and Ian Fleming), science fiction, fantasy (Robert E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien both included stories set in imaginary worlds along with adventure plots), and Westerns. Not all books in these categories are adventure stories. Adventure fiction uses the settings and ideas from these other genres, but its quick and exciting story focuses on the actions of the hero within the setting. A few exceptions, such as Baroness Orczy, Leigh Brackett, and Marion Zimmer Bradley, show that women have written adventure fiction. However, for most of the genre's history, men have been the main writers. Today, more women are writing adventure stories.

For children

Adventure stories written for children started in the 19th century. Some early examples are Johann David Wyss's The Swiss Family Robinson (1812), Frederick Marryat's The Children of the New Forest (1847), and Harriet Martineau's The Peasant and the Prince (1856). During the Victorian era, the adventure story genre grew. Authors like W. H. G. Kingston, R. M. Ballantyne, and G. A. Henty focused on writing adventure fiction for boys. This encouraged writers who usually wrote for adults to try writing for children, such as Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote Treasure Island for young readers. After World War I, writers like Arthur Ransome changed the adventure genre by setting stories in Britain instead of faraway places. At the same time, Geoffrey Trease, Rosemary Sutcliff, and Esther Forbes added more complexity to historical adventure novels. Modern authors, such as Mildred D. Taylor (Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry) and Philip Pullman (the Sally Lockhart novels), have kept the tradition of writing historical adventure stories. Today, children's adventure novels sometimes include difficult topics like terrorism (After the First Death by Robert Cormier, 1979) and conflicts in the Third World (AK by Peter Dickinson, 1990).