Mapping Men and Empire: Geographies of Adventure

by Richard Phillips

First published in 1996. Adventure stories, produced and consumed in vast quantities in eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, narrate encounters between Europeans and the non-European world. They map both European and non-European people and places. In the exotic, uncomplicated and malleable settings of stories like Robinson Crusoe, they make it possible to imagine, and to naturalise and normalise, identities that might seem implausible closer to home. This book discusses the geography of literature and looking at where adventure stories chart colonies and empires, projecting European geographical fantasies onto non-European, real geographies, including the Americas, Africa and Australasia.

216 pages, Hardcover

First published December 6, 1996

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

This is a professor in Human Geography in The United Kingdom, a specialist in Cultural Geography; Histories of Empire; and Postcolonial Criticism.

Richard Phillips’s research spans a series of contrasting yet connected themes:
The World after Empire: themes include Muslim geographies and postcolonial cities
Sexuality, Space and Power: constructions and contestations of sexual identities
Curiosity and Adventure: from children’s books to health and wellbeing policies

Richard is also very interested in geographical education, particularly fieldwork and other forms of curiosity-driven learning, so his research and teaching are closely connected.

Richard developed these interests through a Masters in Geography at the University of California Santa Barbara (1988) and a PhD at the University of British Columbia (1994). He taught at the Universities of Aberystwyth, Salford and Liverpool before taking up a Chair in Human Geography at the University of Sheffield in 2012.

Reviews

[Ayu Palar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A deep post-colonial analysis on how adventure stories map, re-map and unmap the ideology of colonialism, race and gender.