Domestic adventure: Empire and masculinities in popular fiction 1880-1940

With increasing influence from the 1880s, men and boys could read and write romantic tales of travelling to the fringes of empire, to the location of work rendered meaningful in light of imperial ideology. And yet, owing to the increasing sophistication and reach of empire, those global locations of Adventure and escape from women’s entrance into the public sphere were dwindling. The stories of Adventure I will be looking at in this dissertation are content, and sometimes condemned, with staying at home. To varying degrees opposed to women’s growing presence in the public, and particularly the literary, sphere, but without the promised release of colonial escape, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and H.P. Lovecraft all wrote stories suggesting their ambivalence toward the project of imperial capitalism and men’s roles in it. In this thesis I will argue that by forcing Adventure to sit within or alongside domestic concerns contributed to these authors becoming highly attuned to the far reaching consequences of colonialism – even in the otherwise settled scene of the white middle class home. In turn I will show how these stories of domestic Adventure helped prepare new conditions for white men’s labour as a response to changes in Western imperial capitalism. I will chart how these authors are less interested in strictly supporting or opposing imperialism than they are in discovering new redeeming opportunities for labour from the late nineteenth century and into the mid twentieth.

Submission note: This thesis is presented in total fulfilment for the degree of Master of Arts to the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, La Trobe University, Victoria.