British Narratives of Exploration

British Narratives of Exploration PDF

Author: Frédéric Regard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1317316304

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Features a collection of essays that focus on British travel narratives from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth centuries. This work investigates how the early explorers' sense of self was destabilised by encounters with the Other.

The Spectral Arctic

The Spectral Arctic PDF

Author: Shane McCorristine

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2018-05-01

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1787352463

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Visitors to the Arctic enter places that have been traditionally imagined as otherworldly. This strangeness fascinated audiences in nineteenth-century Britain when the idea of the heroic explorer voyaging through unmapped zones reached its zenith. The Spectral Arctic re-thinks our understanding of Arctic exploration by paying attention to the importance of dreams and ghosts in the quest for the Northwest Passage. The narratives of Arctic exploration that we are all familiar with today are just the tip of the iceberg: they disguise a great mass of mysterious and dimly lit stories beneath the surface. In contrast to oft-told tales of heroism and disaster, this book reveals the hidden stories of dreaming and haunted explorers, of frozen mummies, of rescue balloons, visits to Inuit shamans, and of the entranced female clairvoyants who travelled to the Arctic in search of John Franklin’s lost expedition. Through new readings of archival documents, exploration narratives, and fictional texts, these spectral stories reflect the complex ways that men and women actually thought about the far North in the past. This revisionist historical account allows us to make sense of current cultural and political concerns in the Canadian Arctic about the location of Franklin’s ships.

Masters of All They Surveyed

Masters of All They Surveyed PDF

Author: D. Graham Burnett

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780226081212

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Chronicling the British pursuit of the legendary El Dorado, Masters of All They Surveyed tells the fascinating story of geography, cartography, and scientific exploration in Britain's unique South American colony, Guyana. How did nineteenth-century Europeans turn areas they called terra incognita into bounded colonial territories? How did a tender-footed gentleman, predisposed to seasickness (and unable to swim), make his way up churning rivers into thick jungle, arid savanna, and forbidding mountain ranges, survive for the better part of a decade, and emerge with a map? What did that map mean? In answering these questions, D. Graham Burnett brings to light the work of several such explorers, particularly Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, the man who claimed to be the first to reach the site of Ralegh's El Dorado. Commissioned by the Royal Geographical Society and later by the British Crown, Schomburgk explored and mapped regions in modern Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana, always in close contact with Amerindian communities. Drawing heavily on the maps, reports, and letters that Schomburgk sent back to England, and especially on the luxuriant images of survey landmarks in his Twelve Views in the Interior of Guiana (reproduced in color in this book), Burnett shows how a vast network of traverse surveys, illustrations, and travel narratives not only laid out the official boundaries of British Guiana but also marked out a symbolic landscape that fired the British imperial imagination. Engagingly written and beautifully illustrated, Masters of All They Surveyed will interest anyone who wants to understand the histories of colonialism and science.

Tracing the Connected Narrative

Tracing the Connected Narrative PDF

Author: Janice Cavell

Publisher:

Published: 2008-11

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781487559656

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By the 1850s, journalists and readers alike perceived Britain's search for the Northwest Passage as an ongoing story in the literary sense. Because this 'story' appeared, like so many nineteenth-century novels, in a series of installments in periodicals and reviews, it gained an appeal similar to that of fiction. Tracing the Connected Narrative examines written representations of nineteenth-century British expeditions to the Canadian Arctic. It places Arctic narratives in the broader context of the print culture of their time, especially periodical literature, which played an important role in shaping the public's understanding of Arctic exploration. Janice Cavell uncovers similarities between the presentation of exploration reports in periodicals and the serialized fiction that, she argues, predisposed readers to take an interest in the prolonged quest for the Northwest Passage. Cavell examines the same parallel in relation to the famous disappearance and subsequent search for the Franklin expedition. After the fate of Sir John Franklin had finally been revealed, the Illustrated London News printed a list of earlier articles on the missing expedition, suggesting that the public might wish to re-read them in order to 'trace the connected narrative' of this chapter in the Arctic story. Through extensive research and reference to new archival material, Cavell undertakes this task and, in the process, recaptures and examines the experience of nineteenth-century readers.

Writing Arctic Disaster

Writing Arctic Disaster PDF

Author: Adriana Craciun

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-03-17

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1316539040

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How did the Victorian fixation on the disastrous John Franklin expedition transform our understanding of the Northwest Passage and the Arctic? Today we still tend to see the Arctic and the Northwest Passage through nineteenth-century perspectives, which focused on the discoveries of individual explorers, their illustrated books, visual culture, imperial ambitions, and high-profile disasters. However, the farther back one looks, the more striking the differences appear in how Arctic exploration was envisioned. Writing Arctic Disaster uncovers a wide range of exploration cultures: from the manuscripts of secretive corporations like the Hudson's Bay Company, to the nationalist Admiralty and its innovative illustrated books, to the searches for and exhibits of disaster relics in the Victorian era. This innovative study reveals the dangerous afterlife of this Victorian conflation of exploration and disaster, in the geopolitical significance accruing around the 2014 discovery of Franklin's ship Erebus in the Northwest Passage.

Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900

Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900 PDF

Author: ADRIAN S. WISNICKI

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-06-30

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9781032093420

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Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature examines the impact of non-western cultural, political, and social forces and agencies on the production of British expeditionary literature; it is a project of recovery. The book argues that such non-western impact was considerable, that it shaped the discursive and material dimensions of expeditionary literature, and that the impact extends to diverse materials from the expeditionary archive at a scale and depth that critics have previously not acknowledged. The focus of the study falls on Victorian expeditionary literature related to Africa, a continent of accelerating British imperial interest in the nineteenth century, but the study's findings have the potential to inform scholarship on European expeditionary, imperial, and colonial literature from a wide variety of periods and locations. The book's analysis is illustrative, not comprehensive. Each chapter targets intercultural encounters and expeditionary literature associated with a specific time period and African region or location. The book suggests that future scholarship - especially in areas such as expeditionary history, geography, cartography, travel writing studies, and book history - needs to adopt much more of a localized, non-western focus if it is to offer a full account of the production of expeditionary discourse and literature.

Explorations in the Icy North

Explorations in the Icy North PDF

Author: Nanna Katrine Luders Kaalund

Publisher:

Published: 2021-05-11

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9780822946595

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Science in the Arctic changed dramatically over the course of the nineteenth century, when early, scattered attempts in the region to gather knowledge about all aspects of the natural world transitioned to a more unified Arctic science under the First International Polar Year in 1882. The IPY brought together researchers from multiple countries with the aim of undertaking systematic and coordinated experiments and observations in the Arctic and Antarctic. Harsh conditions, intense isolation, and acute danger inevitably impacted the making and communicating of scientific knowledge. At the same time, changes in ideas about what it meant to be an authoritative observer of natural phenomena were linked to tensions in imperial ambitions, national identities, and international collaborations of the IPY. Through a focused study of travel narratives in the British, Danish, Canadian, and American contexts, Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund uncovers not only the transnational nature of Arctic exploration, but also how the publication and reception of literature about it shaped an extreme environment, its explorers, and their scientific practices. She reveals how, far beyond the metropole--in the vast area we understand today as the North American and Greenlandic Arctic--explorations and the narratives that followed ultimately influenced the production of field science in the nineteenth century.

British Discovery Literature and the Rise of Global Commerce

British Discovery Literature and the Rise of Global Commerce PDF

Author: A. Neill

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2002-05-10

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0230629229

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British Discovery Literature and the Rise of Global Commerce examines how, between 1680 and 1800, British maritime travellers became both friends and foes of the commercial state. These nomadic characters report on remote parts of the globe in the twin contexts of an increasingly powerful imperial state and an emerging world economy. Examining voyage narratives by William Dampler, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Tobias Smollett, Samuel Johnson, James Cook, and William Bligh, Neill demonstrates how the transformation of travellers from nomadic outlaws into civil subjects , and vice versa, takes place against the political-economic backdrop of commercial expansion.

Travels into Print

Travels into Print PDF

Author: Innes M. Keighren

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-05-11

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 022623357X

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In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, books of travel and exploration were much more than simply the printed experiences of intrepid authors. They were works of both artistry and industry—products of the complex, and often contested, relationships between authors and editors, publishers and printers. These books captivated the reading public and played a vital role in creating new geographical truths. In an age of global wonder and of expanding empires, there was no publisher more renowned for its travel books than the House of John Murray. Drawing on detailed examination of the John Murray Archive of manuscripts, images, and the firm’s correspondence with its many authors—a list that included such illustrious explorers and scientists as Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell, and literary giants like Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott—Travels into Print considers how journeys of exploration became published accounts and how travelers sought to demonstrate the faithfulness of their written testimony and to secure their personal credibility. This fascinating study in historical geography and book history takes modern readers on a journey into the nature of exploration, the production of authority in published travel narratives, and the creation of geographical authorship—a journey bound together by the unifying force of a world-leading publisher.