White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British ImaginationState University of New York Press, 8. jan. 2009 - 246 sider 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. |
Indhold
| 1 | |
Robert Southeys Life of Nelson and John Franklins Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea | 29 |
The Arctic of Mary Shelley and Eleanor Anne Porden | 53 |
Arctic Spaces in Jane Eyre | 89 |
5 Arctic Highlanders and Englishmen Dickens Cannibalism and Sensation | 113 |
R M Ballantynes Arctic Adventures | 151 |
Notes | 175 |
Index | 231 |
Andre udgaver - Se alle
White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination Jen Hill Begrænset visning - 2009 |
White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-century British Imagination Jen Hill Ingen forhåndsvisning - 2008 |
White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination Jen Hill Ingen forhåndsvisning - 2008 |
Almindelige termer og sætninger
adventure novels Arctic Expeditions Arctic exploration Arctic narrative Arctic space assertions Ballantyne Ballantyne's blank boys Britain British masculinity Britons Brontë Cambridge University Press cannibalism century Charles Dickens Conrad Coral Island critique cultural Dickens's domestic Eleanor Anne Porden empire encounter England English experience exploration accounts female fiction Francis Spufford Frankenstein Franklin expedition Frozen Deep Gender genre geography heroic masculinity homosocial Household Words identifies imagination imperial masculinity imperial project Inuit Jane Eyre Jane's John Franklin Joseph Conrad Journey landscape literal London mapping Mary Shelley melodrama national character national identity national masculinity native nature Nelson nineteenth Nineteenth-Century North Pole Northwest Passage Nugent numbers Oxford participation physical plot poem polar exploration Polar Sea political Porden R. M. Ballantyne racial Rae's readers reveals Romantic Romanticism Routledge sailors sensation novel Shelley ship Southey Southey's tion Victor's Victorian voyage Walton Wardour Wilkie Collins women writing York
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Side 23 - Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.
Side 67 - If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.
Side 33 - What," said he in his answer, "has poor Horatio done, who is so weak, that he, above all the rest, should be sent to rough it out at sea ? But let him come, and the first time we go into action a cannon-ball may knock off his head, and provide for him at once.
Side 22 - The glamour's off. Other places were scattered about the Equator, and in every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in some of them, and . . . well, we won't talk about that. But there was one yet— the biggest, the most blank, so to speak— that I had a hankering after.
Side 104 - Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent, expectant woman— almost a bride, was a cold, solitary girl again: her life was pale; her prospects were desolate. A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud...
Side 93 - Atlantic surge Pours in among the stormy Hebrides ; Who can recount what transmigrations there Are annual made ? what nations come and go ? And how the living clouds on clouds arise ? Infinite wings ! till all the plume-dark air, And rude resounding shore are one wild cry.
Side 106 - ... even from selfrespect. I had injured - wounded - left my master. I was hateful in my own eyes. Still I could not turn, nor retrace one step. God must have led me on. As to my own will or conscience, impassioned grief had trampled one and stifled the other. I was weeping wildly as I walked along my solitary way: fast, fast I went like one delirious. A weakness, beginning inwardly, extending to the limbs, seized me, and I fell: I lay on the ground some minutes, pressing my face to the wet turf....
Side 97 - ... day in the open air. Our clothing was insufficient to protect us from the severe cold. We had no boots; the snow got into our shoes and melted there; our ungloved hands became numbed and covered with chilblains, as were our feet. I remember well the distracting irritation I endured from this cause every evening, when my feet inflamed, and the torture of thrusting the swelled, raw, and stiff toes into my shoes in the morning.
Side 101 - ... sun. I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred it made no sound here for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white, worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide on...
Side 100 - My eye passed all other objects to rest on those most remote, the blue peaks. It was those I longed to surmount; all within their boundary of rock and heath seemed prison-ground, exile limits.