Risk in Children’s Adventure Literature

Elly McCausland

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Hardback

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English

Routledge
31 May 2024

Series: Children's Literature and Culture

Risk in Children’s Adventure Literature examines the way in which adults discuss the reading and entertainment habits of children, and with it the assumption that adventure is a timeless and stable constant whose meaning and value is self-evident. A closer enquiry into British and American adventure texts for children over the past 150 years reveals a host of complexities occluded by the term, and the ways in which adults invoke adventure as a means of attempting to get to grips with the nebulous figure of ‘the child’. Writing about adventure also necessitates writing about risk, and this book argues that adults have historically used adventure to conceptualise the relationship between children and risk: the risks children themselves pose to society; the risks that threaten their development; and how they can be trained to manage risk in socially normative and desirable ways. Tracing this tendency back to its development and consolidation in Victorian imperial romance, and forward through various adventure texts and media to the present day, this book probes and investigates the truisms and assumptions that underlie our generalisations about children’s love for adventure, and how they have evolved since the mid-nineteenth century.

By: Elly McCausland
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 560g
ISBN: 9780367623234
ISBN 10: 0367623234
Series: Children's Literature and Culture
Pages: 204
Publication Date: 31 May 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Eleanor McCausland is Associate Professor of English Literature at Ghent University, where she teaches on children’s literature, nineteenth-century literature, and literature and popular music. Her research interests include medievalism, children’s literature, ecocriticism, and adaptation. She is also an award-winning food writer.