Over His Shoulder

Geoffrey Clarke examines the aesthetics of collaborative fiction, and the novel of masculine action, and attempts to show that a heated genre of fiction developed from Haggard's views on boys' fiction in the late-Victorian period.

The passions arising from a basic tension in the romance genre between romance and realism clouded the central issue in a debate, aspiring as it did, to higher aims and values; a debate which was marked by a heated element which he shows was a screen for the bondings and collaborations behind the literary activities as a key symptom of the genre of imperial fiction.