| White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination Contributor(s): Hill, Jen (Author) |
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ISBN: 0791472302 ISBN-13: 9780791472309 Publisher: State University of New York Press OUR PRICE: $33.20 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: January 2009 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh - History | Polar Regions - History | Europe - Great Britain - General |
| Dewey: 823.809 |
| Series: SUNY Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century |
| Physical Information: 0.61" H x 6.5" W x 8.98" (0.75 lbs) 246 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - British Isles - Chronological Period - 19th Century - Cultural Region - Arctic/Antarctic |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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 Brontė, 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. |