| "Antarcticas of the Imagination: American Authors Explore the Last Continent, 1818-1982" examines the literary use of Antarctic exploration, or how fiction transforms science into symbol. I follow the trail of Americans' vaunted attachment to exploring, describing and settling land--an imperial trilogy whose practices and ideologies account for the "manifest destiny" of North America--into unknown Antarctica, the "last continent." My premise is simple: nineteenth-century Americans, themselves so recently the product of European exploration and settlement, self-consciously projected imperial dreams and nightmares onto the "twin" continent. By focusing on texts--blank paper covered map-like, by configured facts and fancies--to discover a place, Antarctica, which exists before and beyond human definition (for humans will always be foreign to the ice), I replicate the methods of the authors I study, who used images of blankness on the map, of "holes at the poles," and finally, of blank paper itself when facing the challenge of imagining Antarctica. Finding Antarctica has always been a paper chase.;My own paper trail in search of the unknown Antarctic begins with an overview of European conceptions of Antarctica and an introduction to the body of often obscure fiction of Antarctica by Americans. Behind me lies a range of theories of American civilization from those as established as the Frontier Thesis, the Agrarian Myth, feminist and environmentalist revisionism, to more recent writings which extend the idea of exploration from enacted cultural myth to an issue of language. In its broadest design this study extends a trail of anxieties about the cultural costs of Americans' finding, owning, and possibly destroying the land before them. Imagining Antarctica extends the dichotomous view of the wilderness as either desert wasteland or incipient paradise. But it is the advent of the literary imagination that finally transforms the blank spot on the map and the blank page of the imagination into the story of how America invented and reinvented itself on the land and on the page. Consecutive chapters take up Antarctica as the locus of cultural anxieties around expansion, the emergence of the discipline of science, race, and the misuse of the environment. |
