A01=William E. Lenz
Adalbert Von Chamisso
American Antarctic expedition narratives
American cultural perceptions
American literature
American Quarterly Review
Antarctic Continent
Antarctic Exploration
Antarctic Functions
Antarctica
Author_William E. Lenz
Bouvet Island
Category=A
Edmund Fanning
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eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
expeditionary poetics
Exploration Narratives
Exploring Expedition
Fridtjof Nansen
Human Suffering
maritime cultural history
NAR
Narrative poetry
national identity formation
Nineteenth Century American
nineteenth-century exploration literature
North American Review
North West Passage
Parry's Journal
Parry’s Journal
polar literary studies
Red Rover
Sea Fiction
Sea Lions
South Shetland Islands
Southern Literary Messenger
symbolic geography
Voyage Round
White Whale
Wilkes Expedition
Young Men
Product details
- ISBN 9780815314738
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 01 Mar 1995
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The thesis of this book is that the 19th-century interest in the Antarctic functions for modern scholars as an important index to American self-discovery and self-definition from the 1830s onward. According to the author, American hopes for confirming identity came to be focused on an unlikely goal, the discovery of the illusive Antarctic continent. By examining in detail one literary product of the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838-1842) to Antarctica, James Croxall Palmer's epic poem Thulia: A Tale of the Antarctic (1843), and its revision, The Antarctic Mariner's Song (1868), and by locating these works within their cultural context, Lenz reveals the significance and changing meaning of exploration to emerging American concepts of nationhood. The volume also considers the tradition of American sea fiction in the works of such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, arguing that for these writers the Antarctic was a locus of symbolic meaning while for Palmer it was a process of individual and collective perception. The 1868 version of the Palmer poem is attached here as an appendix. A useful bibliography follows that appendix.
