AustLit

'This special issue is the first sustained academic exploration of the contemporary adventure narrative across a wide range of media. While many other types of texts that emerged during the late‐eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including gothic horror, romance, travel narrative, and melodrama, have received considerable attention, the contemporary adventure narrative has been left out of or taken for granted by recent popular culture studies. The absence of adventure in recent scholarship may, paradoxically, have to do with the ubiquitous presence of the form. Like many other genres, adventure has invaded and merged with a host of other modes and genres, from television reality game shows, such as Survivor, to gritty war films, such as Black Hawk Down. Indeed, as several of the contributions to this issue demonstrate, the contemporary adventure form often appears in trans‐genre texts where the adventure component is perceived as secondary.' (Johan Höglund and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet : Revisiting Adventure: Special Issue Introduction )