Antarctica in Fiction
Imaginative Narratives of the Far South

This first comprehensive exploration of literary responses to Antarctica maps the far south as a space of the imagination.

Elizabeth Leane (Author)

9781107020825, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 June 2012

259 pages, 8 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.9 cm, 0.49 kg

'Encyclopedic in its scope, creative in its organization, and lucidly written, Antarctica in Fiction is a solid, lively, and at times surprising study that encompasses everything from Gothic and utopian treatments of the continent in fiction and film to the literature produced by Antarctic explorers and researchers themselves … [it] is a model of meticulous scholarship that should certainly be part of any university library's holdings.' Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

This comprehensive analysis of literary responses to Antarctica examines the rich body of literature that the continent has provoked over the last three centuries, focussing particularly on narrative fiction. Novelists as diverse as Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, Ursula Le Guin, Beryl Bainbridge and Kim Stanley Robinson have all been drawn artistically to the far south. The continent has also inspired genre fiction, including a Mills and Boon novel, a Phantom comic and a Biggles book, as well as countless lost-race romances, espionage thrillers and horror-fantasies. Antarctica in Fiction draws on these sources, as well as film, travel narratives and explorers' own creative writing. It maps the far south as a space of the imagination and argues that only by engaging with this space, in addition to the physical continent, can we understand current attitudes towards Antarctica.

Introduction
1. Speculation visions of the south polar regions
2. Bodies, boundaries and the Antarctic gothic
3. Creative explorations of the heroic era
4. The survival value of literature at high latitudes
5. The transforming nature of Antarctic travel
6. Freezing time in far southern narratives
Coda.

Subject Areas: Australasian & Pacific history [HBJM], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]