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

SUNY Series: Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

by Jen Hill

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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction

246 pages, Hardcover

First published November 29, 2007

About the author

Jen Hill is the illustrator of DIANA'S WHITE HOUSE GARDEN by Elisa Carbone (Viking, May 2016), DOING HER BIT: A STORY ABOUT THE WOMAN'S LAND ARMY OF AMERICA by Erin Hagar (Charlesbridge, September 2016), SPRING FOR SOPHIE by Yael Werber (Paula Wiseman Books/Simon & Schuster Children's, February 2017), and BE KIND by Pat Zietlow Miller (Roaring Brook, February 2018). She is currently illustrating THE UNINTENTIONAL ADVENTURES OF THE BLAND SISTERS, a three book middle-grade series written by Kala LaReau and published by Abrams (January 2017.)

She is also the author and illustrator of PERCY AND TUMTUM: A TALE OF TWO DOGS (Running Press Kids, 2012), a book she wrote about a Pomeranian and a Dachshund, two dogs she one day hopes to own.

Reviews

[Morgiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Literary criticism is not my area of study, so I shall not dwell upon that aspect of this book. I've never had much interest in analyzing a text line by line, word by word, and arguing about whatever academic theory. Readers who like that sort of thing may well enjoy this book, since analyzing representations of the Arctic in 19th century British literature certainly seems like an unusual topic.

Hill covers mostly fiction: Charlotte Brontë, Mary Shelley, Dickens, etc., and also children's adventure stories. What interested me, however, was the inclusion of John Franklin’s Narrative from his first Arctic expedition, and the works of Eleanor Porden, Franklin's first wife, who was a poet. It has certainly been a different perspective, and the portions about Franklin and Porden might be of interest to those interested in polar exploration.