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Polar Travel

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posted on 2023-05-24, 04:58 authored by Elizabeth LeaneElizabeth Leane
Travel writing looms large in literary histories of the polar regions. The bestknown Arctic and Antarctic texts have been and continue to be accounts of travel: official narratives, diaries, and memoirs by explorers – John Franklin, Robert F. Scott, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, and others – and travelogues by professional writers such as Barry Lopez and Sara Wheeler. While the Arctic and Antarctic icescapes have both inspired influential works of fiction and poetry, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), these too centre on tales of travel, drawing on polar exploration accounts for their detail. Many Arctic indigenous peoples are traditionally nomadic, so that storytelling and travel become intertwined in their cultures. But the originally oral and linguistically diverse nature of these cultures means that many of the most prominent Arctic narratives are those produced by travellers from elsewhere. The uninhabited Antarctic takes the dominance of the travel narrative to its apogee: all writing about the Antarctic from experience is travel writing of a sort, in that any encounter with the place is premised on a journey

Funding

Australian Research Council

History

Publication title

The Cambridge History of Travel Writing

Editors

T Youngs and N Das

Pagination

361-375

ISBN

9781316556740

Department/School

School of Humanities

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Place of publication

United Kingdom

Extent

36

Rights statement

Copyright 2019 Cambridge University Press

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Literature

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