Antarctica in Fiction Imaginative Narratives of the Far South [Paperback]

This first comprehensive exploration of literary responses to Antarctica maps the far south as a space of the imagination.This comprehensive and engaging analysis of a wide range of Antarctic fiction  from lost-race romances to espionage thrillers to travellers' tales to horror fantasies  is essential reading for anyone interested in the history, literature and culture of Antarctica and the polar regions.This comprehensive and engaging analysis of a wide range of Antarctic fiction  from lost-race romances to espionage thrillers to travellers' tales to horror fantasies  is essential reading for anyone interested in the history, literature and culture of Antarctica and the polar regions.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 such 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. Encyclopedic in its scope, creative in its organization, and lucidly writtl'