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The article presents a lesson plan for primary education which teaches concepts about reading, writing, and adventure stories, focusing on the children's book "A Pocket for Corduroy."

A literary criticism of the 1909 novel "Mafarka le futuriste" by F. T. Marinetti as an adumbration of Futurist theory in practice is presented. An overview of the novel is provided which focuses on the adventures of Mafarka in Africa who chose to devote himself to the creation of his son after defeating his enemies. Also examined are the novel's genealogy and sculptural imperative and the sculptures by several artists including Umberto Boccioni.

Adventure stories were a feature of children's magazines between 1925 and 1945, both in Japan and in colonial Korea. These stories expressed very different visions, depending on the audience, the period, and the purposes of individual authors. Japanese adventure stories in the bestselling magazine Shōnen kurabu portrayed heroes who ranged widely across the seas, articulating a vision of Japanese as outward-looking explorers of far-flung regions, which resonated with Japanese imperialism. In contrast, adventure stories in Korean magazines focused on adventures in and around Korea, reflecting the relative constraints of the colonial subject, as well as an exploration of Korean identity that was strongly linked to the land of Korea itself. The stories of Bang Jung-hwan in the magazine Orini depicted young Koreans rescuing kidnapped friends and relatives, symbolically representing the restoration of the lost nation by the hands of Koreans themselves. On the other hand, the later adventure story of Kim Nae-Seong portrays Korean heroes who are also subjects of the Japanese empire. Although the children's adventure story as a genre has often been associated with imperial expansion, its use in both Japan and Korea shows that adventure stories could also be used to express alternative visions of identity for the colonized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the question: is The X-Files dangerous to science fiction (SF) and science? Certainly it is one of the most prominent series that, despite being frequently appended with the SF television label, seems to challenge and sometimes eschew basic conceptualizations of the genre. Furthermore, at the height of its success the series was criticized by scientists such as Richard Dawkins for disseminating and popularizing anti-rational and potentially anti-scientific perspectives. On these grounds, the answer to our question appears to be yes. However, detailed analysis of the series reveals quite a different picture. Firstly, even attempts to distance the series from SF effectively encapsulate reasons for that very labelling. These specifically revolve around the use of the phrase ‘extreme possibilities’. Secondly, far from presenting a simplistic juxtaposition of belief and reason, the series instead involves a dialogic exchange that helps to articulate the role of scientific inquiry in approaching the unknown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to a special issue of Thesis Eleven devoted to science fiction begins by exploring the way the genre has been handled by German and French critical theory and their Anglophone equivalents. It proceeds to a discussion of the historical sociology of the genre and, thence, to an account of what it terms the dialectic of science fiction endangerment. Finally, it concludes with a brief overview of the various contributions to the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this reflective article, I examine three versions of adventurous writing. The first contrasts academic writing as either (or both) an anxiety-inducing task or a potentially animating and enjoyable quest. The second takes an auto-ethnographic approach to argue for the making of academic texts that are intended to be truthful and detailed accounts of their authors’ embodied experiences. The third version, playfully and even subversively, uses the example of a modern novel to suggest that all writing is “a trying adventure” where writers adopt whatever roles or stances suit their own critical and social purposes for verisimilitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of effeminisation by the imperial gaze, Bengali middle classes in colonial India were troubled by questions of manhood. This concern was represented in popular culture – specifically literature – as a quest for masculinity. In this article, we turn our attention to the genre of boy adventure stories, about which scholarship on gender and nation in the Indian context has been largely silent. Bengali boy adventure stories circulated a vision of ‘proper manhood’ implicitly tied to the ability for self-determination by centring on a strong male figure ready to take death-defying risks and go into battle for the nation. In this article, we use a piece of iconic juvenile fiction, the novel Chander Pahar or Mountain of the Moon (1937), written by the popular author Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhay (1894–1950) to present a genealogy of manhood and nation being imagined by, and for, the colonised middle classes of Bengal within a context of colonial globalisation. In a provocative intersection of racialisation and gender, ‘Africa’ – created as the dark ‘other’ – highlights the civilised manliness of the Bengali hero. We end by briefly addressing the implications of the cultural rejuvenation of this novel’s view of manhood and nation within a globalising, modern India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]