British Children’s Adventure Novels in the Web of Colonialism

This book fills a remarkable void in literary studies which has escaped the attention of many researchers. It interrogates the extent to which nineteenth-century children’s adventure novels justify and perpetuate the British Imperialist ideology of the period. In doing so, it begins with providing a historical background of children’s literature and nineteenth-century British imperialism. It then offers a theoretical framework of postcolonial reading to decipher the colonial discourse employed in the selected children’s adventure novels. As such, the book offers postcolonial readings of R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858), W.H.G. Kingston’s In the Wilds of Africa (1871), and H.R. Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885). It will appeal to students, academicians and researchers in fields such as postcolonialism, children’s literature and British Imperialism.