White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination

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SUNY Press, 8 de jan. de 2009 - 246 páginas
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 Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Wilkie Collins, Jen H ill 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.
 

Conteúdo

HEART OF WHITENESS
1
NATIONAL BODIES Robert Southeys Life of Nelson and John Franklins Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea
29
A PROPITIOUS HARD FROST The Arctic of Mary Shelley and Eleanor Anne Porden
53
A PALE BLANK OF MIST AND CLOUD Arctic Spaces in Jane Eyre
89
ARCTIC HIGHLANDERS AND ENGLISHMEN Dickens Cannibalism and Sensation
113
ENDS OF THE EARTH ENDS OF THE EMPIRE RM Ballantynes Arctic Adventures
151
NOTES
175
BIBLIOGRAPHY
207
INDEX
231
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Sobre o autor (2009)

Jen Hill is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada at Reno and editor of An Exhilaration of Wings: The Literature of Birdwatching.

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