SOURCE: "Fantasy as Adventure: Nineteenth Century Children's Fiction," in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 3, Fall, 1983, pp. 18-22.

In the excerpt that follows, McGillis studies the ambivalence about fantasy in Victorian adventure stories, noting a simultaneous attraction to and fear of "the disruption of social reality" that fantasy promises.

In The Adventurer [1974], [Paul] Zweig suggests that in the nineteenth century, adventure, like the quest romance, became internalized; he also suggests that a "resemblance exists between the adventurer exploring the countries of the marvelous and the 'absent' one: each finds his way to the 'other' world and returns to tell the story." The "absent one" is the shaman who, through illness or some other means, transports to a mysterious world of hidden realities. As Zweig argues:

The shaman's vocation as an ecstatic traveler resembles that of the archaic adventurer. Both forge an immunity to the perils of the demonic...