The chapter offers an analysis of an understudied episode in British and American popular fiction. Inspired by Greenland’s vanished settlers, a number of tales imagine isolation as a means to preserve the virtues and primordial purity of a white, ancestral past. These ‘lost colony’ stories are examined as partly compensatory fantasies that would offset contemporary concerns about cultural and racial decay for a culture under stress. They are narratives about communities – modelled on the idea of a lost European colony – that have been shielded from the corruption visited upon the Western world. Thus, the stories are often concerned with ethnic purity and eugenics. The last part of the chapter unravels the early twentieth-century press sensation that disrupted fantasies of ring-fenced whiteness in the Arctic. This was the discovery of the so-called Blond Eskimos in Victoria Island, who were purportedly the result of the old Greenland colonists having intermixed with the Indigenous population. The chapter concludes with an examination of how this new imagining of the fate of Greenland’s vanished settlers also impacted the writing of adventure tales for the popular market.

This essay draws on Pheng Cheah’s insights in What is a World? to examine the contrasting spatiotemporalities of colonial adventure and continental drift in French Indochinese colonial-exotic literature of the 1920s and 1930s. I look first at how the genre worlds in a narrow, linear sense, discursively mapping the spatialized colony in concert with imperialist projections. The focus here is on the ways in which these novels chart the advance of capital through the colony as a spatial category, a distant and subordinate appendage of France, the global center. I then consider Jean d’Esme’s Les Dieux rouges (The Red Gods: A Romance, 1923) as a deviation from the conventions of the genre and the calculated path it lays out. Equal parts colonial-exotic and speculative fiction, Les Dieux rouges tells an alternative geological history of continental drift that undoes the colonizer’s materialist assumptions about the natural world. Through the creation of a parallel, prehistoric world inside the colony but outside the reach of empire, D’Esme’s novel demonstrates a profound dis-ease with the colonial project, an anxiety that, unlike the hesitation that marked many narratives of the period, points to France’s ultimate inability to map Indochina – physically, temporally, or epistemologically – and by extension, the rest of la plus grande France. Les Dieux rouges worlds the colony in the Heideggerian sense by opening up an alternative temporality within it, by imagining, in Cheah’s words, “a force that subtends and exceeds all human calculations that reduce the world as temporal structure to the sum of objects in space” (8). The novel returns the colonizer to the beginning of human time and the human race, not to imply simply that colonialism is a regression, but to challenge the ontological and political realities upon which imperialist assumptions are based.

This chapter describes the ways in which a set of ‘romance’ signs create a landscape as the site of an individual adventure, journey of growth, and path to fulfilment. The structuring of romance affects is not only prolific in literature and folk tales, but has all kinds of implications for geophysical landscapes as well: from touristic discourses which describe specific destinations as sites of ‘romance’ and ‘adventure,’ to film narratives which intersect with tourism by leveraging on viewer fandom to popularize certain film locations, to the semiotics of amusement parks and other attractions.

A productive way of approaching Chaucer’s sustained, innovative, often enigmatic engagement with romance can be to entertain the proposition that for him romance was as much a received literary form, predicated on its protagonists’ engagement with adventure and marvel, as it was a model for authorial adventurousness that invited him to compose new and counterintuitive literary marvels. In this, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale shares something of the Gawain-poet’s grave subversion of and experimentation with existing romance form. However, Chaucer’s knowledge of the scholastic impossibilium (as articulated, for instance, through the Franklin and the Wife of Bath), points to a further experimental underpinning, such that we see in his romances the marvel of the marvel-made-empirical.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.