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Contemporary anxieties about the future of humanity have led Western billionaires, tech companies, and political figures alike to speculate about annexing landscapes beyond our planet. Our 21st-century fascination with venturing into the unknown evokes some critical questions: who has the authority to discover and colonize new landscapes? How does exploration, in both its geographical and ideological registers, reflect cultural values, desires, and anxieties? 

This course considers how our modern understanding of exploration as a process of colonial conquest developed across the 19th-century through the popular genre of adventure fiction. By situating “adventure” within its 19th-century contexts of imperial expansion and industrial capitalism, we will use Victorian adventure novels and short stories to consider socio-political topics such as race, gender, and class as they intersect with 19th-century discussions of natural history, science and technology, and anthropology. The course modules will cover texts set in different geographical areas that fascinated the Victorians – including Central Africa, the South Pacific, the Arctic, and Antarctica, as well the deep ocean and Earth ������ý ’s subterranean spaces – by authors such as Rider Haggard, Jules Verne, R.M. Ballantyne, R.L. Stevenson, James De Mille, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Wherever possible, we will discuss these 19th-century texts alongside their successors in modern media (such as Christopher Nolan ������ý ’s 2014 film Interstellar) to consider the ongoing legacy of the adventure genre and to examine what contemporary adventure narratives can teach us about our own cultural zeitgeist.