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‘He comes back badder and bigger than ever!’ Readapting the masculine and negotiating the feminine in treasure-hunting adventure fiction

Over the last decades, genre fiction has witnessed the invasion of a horde of female authors writing from a self-consciously feminist perspective who have shaken the structural and ideological foundations of genres such as romance, detective and science fiction. Some genres such as adventure, however, remain recalcitrantly impervious to change. Although it has increasingly incorporated heroines that share space with the tough heroes, the ideological premises from which adventure operates remain essentially masculinist. In fact, it can be regarded as a patriarchal redoubt from which men combat the thrust of feminist oppositional forces intent on using generic fiction to advance their causes and to help operate a transformation in the form of masculinity that has for a long time served as a parameter in our western world. Taking some contemporary film and narrative examples of treasure-hunting adventure as case studies, my objective in this paper is to analyse how adventure has incorporated superficial textual changes, while failing to effect a profound transformation in the nature and form of its discourse, remaining a mummified stronghold of patriarchal conventions that are becoming increasingly outmoded.