White horizon : the Arctic in the nineteenth-century British imagination / Jen Hill.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hill, Jen.

Series:

SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Arctic regions--In literature.

Arctic regions.

Geography in literature.

Explorers in literature.

Adventure and adventurers in literature.

Imperialism in literature.

Arctic Regions.

Physical Description:

viii, 238 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, [2008]

Summary:

Bridging historical and literary studies, White Horizon explores the importance of the Arctic to British understandings of masculine identity, the nation, and the rapidly expanding British Empire in the nineteenth century. Well before Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, polar space had come to represent the limit of both empire and human experience. Using a variety of texts, from explorers' accounts to boys' adventure fiction, as well as provocative and fresh readings of the works of Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and Wilkie Collins, Jen Hill illustrates the function of Arctic space in the nineteenth-century British social imagination, arguing that the desolate north was imagined as a "pure" space, a conveniently blank page on which to write narratives of Arctic exploration that both furthered and critiqued British imperialism.

Contents:

1 Heart of Whiteness 1

2 National Bodies: Robert Southey's Life of Nelson and John Franklin's Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea 29

3 A Propitious Hard Frost: The Arctic of Mary Shelley and Eleanor Anne Porden 53

4 A Pale Blank of Mist and Cloud: Arctic Spaces in Jane Eyre 89

5 Arctic Highlanders and Englishmen: Dickens, Cannibalism, and Sensation 113

6 Ends of the Earth, Ends of the Empire: R. M. Ballantyne's Arctic Adventures 151.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 207-230) and index.

ISBN:

9780791472293

0791472299

OCLC:

85813944