Adventure Novel

The adventure novel is a variety of the novel whose plot is built on a series of unusual, sharp, and often dangerous events — travels, adventures, trials, and mysteries — that succeed one another at a rapid pace and keep the reader in constant suspense. The genre is marked by a dynamic plot, an energetic hero, an exotic background, struggle, and unexpected turns. Classic world models are the novels of Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island), Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), and Alexandre Dumas. In Ukrainian literature a vivid example of the adventure-psychological novel is Ivan Bahriany's The Hunters and the Hunted — an absorbing story of the young Hryhorii Mnohohrishny's escape from a Soviet prisoner train bound for the Far East and survival in the Ussuri taiga, in which dynamic adventure is combined with the affirmation of the unbreakability of the human spirit and national dignity. Elements of the adventure genre are also present in adventure-historical prose for youth.