Heroic Fear: Emotions, Masculinity, and Dangerous Nature in British Colonial Adventure Narratives

The image of the heroic adventurer, who shot big game or traveled remote regions of the earth, populated the British Empire’s exploration and hunting narratives. Scholars have done much to deconstruct this image but have so far barely touched on the emotional dimensions of encounters between Britons and dangerous natural environments in tropical colonies. This article combines literary-historical criticism with a history of emotions perspective to show how the expression or, alternately, elision of fear in adventure memoirs helped to frame encounters with wild animals and sheer topography as part of imperialism’s moral project. It analyzes texts that recount events in and around India and parts of Africa, published between the 1890s and 1940s. The article’s author discusses a range of authors from obscure settlers and army officers to well-known proponents of the adventure genre such as Mary Kingsley, Jim Corbett, and Francis Kingdon-Ward. Together, these accounts demonstrated that fear held a legitimate and powerful place in heroic imperial narratives by helping readers to identify with the danger that a narrator had to overcome. Narratives of fear increased in number and forthrightness after the First World War, highlighting the impact of the wider British questioning of prewar models of heroic masculinity on imperial adventure literature.