SUNY Press Catalog - Spring 2009 - (Page 64) literature WHITE HOrIZON White horizon The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination New in Paper Zimmerman Sketch #2A 01/29/07 Black / PMS 4695C Jen Hill The Arctic in the NineteenthCentury British Imagination Jen Hill From explorers’ accounts to boys’ adventure fiction, how Arctic exploration served as a metaphor for nation-building and empire in nineteenth-century Britain. Excavating � EXCAVATING VICTOrIANS Virginia Zimmerman How Victorians reacted to the new sciences of geology and archaeology. Victorians � 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 nineteenthcentury 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. “…argues persuasively that during the nineteenth century the Arctic served as a blank space onto which readers could project their ideas, emotions, and beliefs concerning the British colonial project.” — CHOICE JANuArY • 238 pp $17.95 pb 978-0-7914-7230-9 Excavating Victorians examines nineteenth-century Britain’s reaction to the revelations about time and natural history provided by the new sciences of geology and archaeology. The Victorians faced one of the greatest paradigm shifts in history: the bottom dropped out of time, and they had to reinvent their relationship to the earth and to time and history. These new sciences took the Victorians by storm, inundating them with fossils, skeletal remains, and potsherds— artifacts, or traces, that served at once as relics from the past, objects in the present, and markers of time’s passage.Virginia Zimmerman explores how the Victorians utilized a nexus of literature, excavation, and reflections on time to ease anxieties about the individual’s fate in the face of time’s overwhelming expanse. The function of artifacts is also considered through careful readings of Tennyson’s The Princess and Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend. Zimmerman shows how these literary works make use of the language, tropes, and even generic conventions of excavation, and how they participate in the effort to rescue the individual from temporal insignificance. Virginia Zimmerman “…the volume’s interdisciplinary nature and Zimmerman’s engaging, clear style make the book valuable for readers in a variety of fields.” — CHOICE JANuArY • 231 pp 2 b/w photographs, 12 figures $21.95 pb 978-0-7914-7280-4 e www.sunypress.edu e 64 http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61505 http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61528 http://www.sunypress.edu
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