Short answers, pulled from the story.
Critic Don D'Ammassa defines adventure fiction as stories in which events happen outside the protagonist's ordinary life, usually accompanied by danger and often by physical action. The pace of the plot is at least as important as characterization or setting. Danger must be the central focus, not a secondary element.
Yes. Critic Don D'Ammassa argues that A Tale of Two Cities qualifies as an adventure novel because its protagonists are in constant danger of being imprisoned or killed. By contrast, Dickens's Great Expectations is not considered an adventure novel, because the protagonist's encounter with the convict is only a device to advance a plot that is not truly an adventure.
The major pulp magazines specializing in adventure fiction were Adventure, Argosy, Blue Book, Top-Notch, and Short Stories. These publications dominated American popular fiction from the Progressive Era through the 1950s.
Johann David Wyss's The Swiss Family Robinson, published in 1812, is among the earliest examples of adventure fiction written specifically for children. Frederick Marryat's The Children of the New Forest (1847) and Harriet Martineau's The Peasant and the Prince (1856) followed in the same tradition.
Baroness Orczy, Leigh Brackett, and Marion Zimmer Bradley are named as notable exceptions in a genre that has been largely dominated by male writers. Female writers are now becoming more common in adventure fiction.
Adventure fiction borrows settings and premises from war novels, crime novels, detective novels, sea stories, spy stories, science fiction, fantasy, and Westerns. The key distinction is the fast-paced plot focused on a hero's actions in a dangerous setting. Robert E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien both combined the fantasy secondary world with the adventure novel's structure, and spy writers such as John Buchan, Eric Ambler, and Ian Fleming are also associated with the adventure genre.