The Adventurer

The description for this book, The The Fate of Adventure in the Western World, will be forthcoming.

Originally published in 1974, Paul Zweig's The Adventurer is a stellar example of a critical essay that thrillingly brings the history of ideas to life. In a masterful series of analyses, Zweig surveys the genre of the "adventure story," which in his view encompasses a wide range of literary and philosophical texts stretching from the Odyssey and Gilgamesh, through Casanova's History of My Life and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, to Thus Spake Zarathustra and the work of modern writers such as Norman Mailer; through changes in the concept of "adventure," Zweig charts fundamental shifts in humankind's sense of self. This is an intellectually exuberant and profoundly insightful work of scholarship.