Traditional Adventure Stories in the Modern World

This essay will critically examine the question ‘What is the place of adventure stories such as Treasure Island in the modern child’s world’. This essay aims to discuss about the literature of adventures stories and how it could impact children’s life. ?  This essay will discuss the ideology of modern child’s fiction and the boundary between the imaginary and real life of children

Treasure Island is a captivating tale about complexities of good and evil, adventures at sea and pirates. Treasure Island is written story for boys in which girls are mainly absent. As Stevenson novel combines a familiar search plan structure and as young male hero. This enables to explore a cabin boy’s identification from being a young innocent boy to an absence of females and family which enabled him to grow with emphasis on independence , physical strength and bravery. Peter Huntdemonstrate that Treasure Island contain a form of social control , As this adventure story shows the desired control of the author and  the ethic of this aspect of children’s fiction conviction that the English were the best race in the world as this may have contributed to the causes of the first world war. As Peter argued that ”children’s writes must carefully consider the effect their stories have on young readers”.

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I believe that Treasure Island is modern children’s book especially written for younger boys , in which it is purely obvious that girls are not every bit as adventurous as boy that clearly shows the ideologies concerning gender construction.  However adventure stories convey themes of voyages, danger and terror were aimed at boys and men. Such books have been recognised as forms of social control and ways of impact and creating a constructed masculine and feminine identity and cultural norms as well as upgrade ideals of how society should be agreed. Treasure Island deals with survival as ones life from pirates as the environment which makes the innocent cabin boy to become mature throughout his adventure journey. This will impact and teach children the ideas on how to survive on ones own instinct and training. Martin Green describes Treasure Island as ‘deeply the fantasy of men-being-boys’, it also describes the fantasy of how boys turn out to be men but as this identification takes place is not morally fantasy but rather divided and marked by class.

Stevenson suggests that the purpose of romance is to allow one to escape creatively into a fictive regeneration of the world of his boyhood fantasies, and Treasure Island demonstrates this purpose as the novel call the attention of the children that appeals to their imagination and adventurous side of life. The most remarkable feature of the novel is its insistence on the continuity and similarity of boyish and adult experience, on the submergence of adult moral perspective in a boy’s point of view.

Doyne Farmer defines ‘Adventure fiction is the form of literature most directly connected to storytelling, an art form’ Adventures fiction has a huge impact of children’s life ethics as well as social morals. The modern children’s adventure novel sometimes deals with controversial issues like terrorism. Jacqueline Rose claims that innocent is not ”propert of childhood but a portion of adult desire” as she explains Peter pan novel contains full of adventures, romance and fiction. She also portrays that adult who publish children’s books are nearly always conscious of conveying morals and values to their young audience, who want to ensure that those morals and values are culturally acceptable.

The story start and ends as recollection

he modern children’s adventure novel sometimes deals with controversial issues like terrorism

we can, perhaps, make pragmatic guesses about what a child can understand, or what is irrelevant to the child and might thus be ignored – but these are only guesses. And if one is prepared simply to believe that books do not have the potential to pass on subliminal messages, then why are we as a culture so concerned with the infl uence of advertising or propaganda on the young? Is it because with children’s literature we are dealing with stories, and that stories are, by defi nition, fi ction, untrue and therefore not infl uential? Surely not, when we acknowledge that stories are so powerful throughout the culture. On top of that is the whole question of literacy and understanding. How we measure who understands what is endlessly diffi cult: as Michael Benton, a distinguished educationalist, has observed: ‘There are … few of us who have not felt unnerved at some time by the fact that when children read stories there is no observable outcome … The story has happened inside the child’s head’ (in Fox, 1983: 19). The awesome complexity of how children learn to read, and then how they negotiate longer texts – denotation, connotation, genre, intertextual meanings and all the rest – should make us extremely careful about applying the curious formulae that occur so often in literary criticism: ‘the reader sees’, ‘we see’, and so on (or the equivalent phrases of children’s-book reviewing: ‘children will like’, ‘girls will love’). The most common, and commonly unchallenged, oddity about all literary criticism is the assumption that all readers will ‘read’ the same thing from a text: the same images, the same emotions, the same allusions. This is diffi cult enough to imagine among adults even of the same class and same generation in the same country: to imagine that it is possible with inexperienced readers is absurd. If we are engaging with  texts for children we need to see that our motivation does not entitle us to make assumptions about what any reader but ourselves perceives

presented in the novel call the attention of the kids that appeals to their imagination and adventurous side of life

The main message of the novel is: the ethics and morality, the values of good and evil are intrinsically ambiguous, so that in the end all choices are to be taken individually as personal acts of assuming one’s responsibility in life, towards all others who surround us. So, this novel has everything to be successful between the young and teenagers for the next generations, as it is an up to date novel, that will always serve as an escape from these children’s reality

The boundary between the imaginary and the real in the lives of children and the uncertainties openness surrounding both make children especially capable of being moved by stories which give form to the experience of their inner world.

When children read fiction they are exposed to the beliefs which inform and structure their society. The books encourage child readers to internalise particular ways of seeing the world and help shape their development as individuals. Although this process forms a key part of their education, it remains largely invisible. As well as a story, fictions impart a significance to readers – often without revealing its presence or ground – and therefore have considerable potential to socialize their audience. John Stephens analyses this process and shows how fictions can work to constrain or liberate audience responses. He explores picture books as well as historical, realistic and fantastic fictions to show how both a character within the narrative and the implied reader are positioned within ideology. The author considers areas of ideology not previously examined and offers new perspectives on realism and fantasy. The book will be of interest to linguists and teachers as well as to the general reader.

This perception is mirrored in the fiction itself in tendency for children’s fiction to focus attention predominantly on the individual psyche. Arguably the most pervasive theme in children’s fiction is the transition with in the individual from infantile solipsism to maturing social awareness.

Fiction allows a child to work on a variety of concerns, fears and problems. More often children tend to fantasise being in an imaginary world simply because some of the children cannot differentiate fiction and real life. The experience of childhood can be quite different in cultures in which

Fiction has often been used quite consciously as a form of social control, reflecting and endorsing patriarchal societal norms. Damaging and opposing constructions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ remain pervasive in fiction both influencing and endorsing such dangerous ideals in wider culture.