Title: Confronting Genocide: Latin America, adventure fiction and the moral crisis of British imperialism
Abstract: Adventure fiction was widely employed by British writers during the nineteenth century to address serious questions of politics and morality, particularly those arising from the nation's imperial responsibilities.The nineteenth-century adventure tales that argued for or justified the extension of empire were, in Martin Green's well-worn phrase, 'the energising myth of English imperialism.They were, collectively, the story England told itself as it went to sleep at night, and, in the form of its dreams, they charged England's will with the energy to go out into the world and explore, and conquer and rule.' 1 By the mid nineteenth century, however, some of these adventure narratives, particularly those set in Latin America, were less likely to bring on a reassuring slumber than they were to engender nightmares of self-doubt before waking the sleeper with a nasty start.At a time when the popular literature of empire was slavishly heroworshipping or blindly propagandistic, and high culture all but refused to acknowledge the existence of an imperial frontier, adventure fiction set in Latin America furnished a unique critical and intellectual space within which the political, social and moral consequences of empire might be thought through or imaginatively enacted. 2