White Horizon, livre ebook

From explorers' accounts to boys' adventure fiction, how Arctic exploration served as a metaphor for nation-building and empire in nineteenth-century Britain.

From explorers' accounts to boys' adventure fiction, how Arctic exploration served as a metaphor for nation-building and empire in nineteenth-century Britain.

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.

Acknowledgments

1. Heart of Whiteness

2. National Bodies: Robert Southey’s Life of Nelson and John Franklin’s Voyage to the Polar Sea

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

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

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

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

Notes
Bibliography
Index