Perspectives originating from inside and outside the Arctic, along with hybrid positions, are examined, with special attention being given to the textual genres, narratives and figures which they mobilize, together with to the close relationship between the Arctic as an unknown place and the literary imagination. The different chapters address a wide geographical range of texts, providing a necessary supplement to most previous work in the field, and also address the wide variety of genres which flourish under the aegis of Arctic discourse, ranging from exploration accounts, travel-writing, political texts and journalism through diaries and historical documents to novels and novelizations, and including also other media, such as music and opera.
Anka Ryall, Johan Schimanski, and Henning Howlid Wærp, eds. Arctic Discourses. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010.
ISBN 978-1443819596
Arctic Discourses: An Introduction ix-xxii
Part I: Discovering the Arctic
Chapter One 2-18
“Traces against time’s erosion”: The Polar Explorer between Documentation and Projection
Hanna Eglinger
Chapter Two 19-42
A Black Rectangle Labelled “Polar Night”: Imagining the Arctic after the Austro-Hungarian Expedition of 1872-1874
Johan Schimanski and Ulrike Spring
Chapter Three 43-58
Fridtjof Nansen, First Crossing of Greenland (1890): Bestseller and Scientific Report
Henning Howlid Wærp
Chapter Four 59-81
Voicing the Arctic: Knud Rasmussen and the Ambivalence of Cultural Translation
Kirsten Thisted
Chapter Five 82-105
The Culture of Nature: The View of the Arctic Environment in Knud Rasmussen’s Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition
Fredrik Chr. Brøgger
Chapter Six 106-131
City of the Sun on Ice: The Soviet (Counter-) Discourse of the Arctic in the 1930s
Susi K. Frank
Chapter Seven 132-150
The Conquest of the Arctic: The 1937 Soviet Expedition
Tim Youngs
Part II: Imagining and Reimagining the Arctic
Chapter Eight 152-178
“I was as true and loyal as possible”: Images of the North and the Sámi in Theodor Mügge’s Travel Writing
Cathrine Theodorsen
Chapter Nine 179-198
Representations of the Arctic in Nineteenth-Century French Prose Fiction
Wendy Mercer
Chapter Ten 199-217
The Times of Men, Mysteries and Monsters: The Terror and Franklin’s Last Expedition
Maria Lindgren Leavenworth
Chapter Eleven 218-239
Arctic Crime Discourse: Dana Stabenow’s Kate Shugak Series
Heidi Hansson
Chapter Twelve 240-258
Telling an Arctic Tale: Arctic Discourses in Canadian Foreign Policy
Lisa Williams
Chapter Thirteen 259-282
Anerca: Representations of Inuit Poetry in Twentieth-Century Art Music
Laurel Parsons
Chapter Fourteen 283-300
From the “Hand of Franklin” to Frobisher: Opera in the Canadian North
Sherrill Grace
Chapter Fifteen 301-328
Nils-Aslak Valkeapää: Indigenous Voice and Multimedia Artist
Harald Gaski
More info:
Johan Schimanski (Dr. Art.)
johan.schimanski@uit.no
Associate Professor of General and Comparative Literature
Department of Culture and Literature
Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education
University of Tromsoe
Address: HSL-fakultetet, UiT, NO-9037 Tromsoe, Norge
+47-77 64 42 31
Book Release; Arctic Discourses
Mon, Sep 27, 2010
Both fictional and non-fictional accounts of the Arctic have long been a major source of powerful images of the region, and have thus had a crucial part to play in the history of human activities there. This volume provides a wide-reaching investigation into the discourses involved in such accounts, above all into the consolidation of a discourse of 'Arcticism' (modelled on Edward Said's concept of 'Orientalism'), but also into the many intersecting discourses of imperialism, nationalism, masculinity, modernity, geography, science, race, ecology, indigeneity, aesthetics, etc.