The Ultimate Adventure: Exploring the Religious Roots and Gender Politics of Victorian Era Children’s Adventure Fiction

This paper investigates the religious influences and gender complications of the children’s adventure fiction genre that overtook the publishing industry in the late Victorian Era in England. By tracing how children’s literature evolved from religious and morally instructive beginnings to a unified literary genre, to a suddenly segregated platform by the year 1900, I place a particular emphasis on how the Church of England and female authors fit themselves into the equation. Relying on multiple scholarly intersections, my research takes an interdisciplinary approach through a variety of in-depth case studies. These case studies include a review of early chapbooks, religious children's periodicals and select missionary writings in addition to a close reading of author Edith Nesbit's adventure novel, The Story of the Amulet (1906). From these case studies, I argue that as the deeply rooted relationship between women and the Church of England continued while the Church’s relationship to the publishing industry grew, so too did these women writer’s ability to push gender stereotypes, despite their continued operation in a traditional familial context. Therefore, as this paper states, this is not an instance of how women wrote the Empire, but an instance of how women rewrote themselves through the adventure fiction they penned throughout the century.Bachelor of Art