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Adventure fiction is a type of fiction that usually presents danger, or gives the reader a sense of excitement. Some adventure fiction also satisfies the literary definition of romance fiction."Essay on Romance", Prose Works volume vi, p. 129, quoted in "Introduction" to Walter Scott's Quentin Durward, ed. Susan Maning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. xxv.
D'Ammassa argues that adventure stories make the element of danger the focus; hence he argues that Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities is an adventure novel because the protagonists are in constant danger of being imprisoned or killed, whereas Dickens's Great Expectations is not because "Pip's encounter with the convict is an adventure, but that scene is only a device to advance the main plot, which is not truly an adventure."
Adventure has been a common theme since the earliest days of written fiction. Indeed, the standard plot of Heliodorus, and so durable as to be still alive in Adventure film, a hero would undergo a first set of adventures before he met his lady. A separation would follow, with the second set of adventures leading to a final reunion.
Variations kept the genre alive. From the mid-19th century onwards, when mass literacy grew, adventure became a popular subgenre of fiction. Although not exploited to its fullest, adventure has seen many changes over the years – from being constrained to stories of knights in armor to stories of high-tech espionage.
Examples of that period include Sir Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas, père,Green, Martin Burgess. Seven Types of Adventure Tale: An Etiology of A Major Genre. Penn State Press, 1991 (pp. 71–2). Jules Verne, the Brontë Sisters, Rudyard Kipling, Sir H. Rider Haggard, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Victor Hugo,Taves, Brian. The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Adventure Movies.University Press of Mississippi, 1993 (p. 60) Emilio Salgari, Karl May, Louis Henri Boussenard, Thomas Mayne Reid, Sax Rohmer, A. Merritt, Talbot Mundy, Edgar Wallace, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Adventure and short stories were popular subjects for American , which dominated American popular fiction between the Progressive Era and the 1950s.Lee Server. Danger is My Business: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines. Chronicle Books, 1993 (pp. 49–60). Several pulp magazines such as Adventure, Argosy, Blue Book, Top-Notch, and Short Stories specialized in this genre. Notable pulp adventure writers included Edgar Rice Burroughs, Talbot Mundy, Theodore Roscoe, Johnston McCulley, Arthur O. Friel, Harold Lamb, Carl Jacobi, George F. Worts, Georges Surdez, H. Bedford-Jones, and J. Allan Dunn.Robinson, Frank M. and Davidson, Lawrence. Pulp Culture – The Art of Fiction Magazines. Collectors Press Inc. 2007 (pp. 33–48).
Adventure fiction often overlaps with other genres, notably , , , sea story, , spy stories (as in the works of John Buchan, Eric Ambler and Ian Fleming), science fiction, fantasy, (Robert E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien both combined the secondary world story with the adventure novel)David Pringle. The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London, Carlton pp. 33–5 and Western fiction. Not all books within these genres are adventures. Adventure fiction takes the setting and premise of these other genres, but the fast-paced plot of an adventure focuses on the actions of the hero within the setting. With a few notable exceptions (such as Baroness Orczy, Leigh Brackett and Marion Zimmer Bradley)Richard Lupoff. Master of Adventure: The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs. University of Nebraska Press, 2005 (pp.194, 247) adventure fiction as a genre has been largely dominated by male writers, though female writers are now becoming common.
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