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

by Hill, Jen

• ISBN13: 9780791472309
• ISBN10: 0791472302
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-01-01
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

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. Book jacket.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Heart of Whiteness	p. 1
National Bodies: Robert Southey's Life of Nelson and John Franklin's Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea	p. 29
A Propitious Hard Frost: The Arctic of Mary Shelley and Eleanor Anne Porden	p. 53
A Pale Blank of Mist and Cloud: Arctic Spaces in Jane Eyre	p. 89
Arctic Highlanders and Englishmen: Dickens, Cannibalism, and Sensation	p. 113
Ends of the Earth, Ends of the Empire: R. M. Ballantyne's Arctic Adventures	p. 151
Notes	p. 175
Bibliography	p. 207
Index	p. 231
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