Arctic, the

• Main Author: Hill, Jen
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: Wiley 2015
• Subjects: Arctic; Dickens
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781118405376.wbevl015; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1002%2F9781118405376.wbevl015; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781118405376.wbevl015

The Arctic and Arctic exploration held a prominent place in Victorian popular and print culture. Admiralty support for Arctic exploration missions in the early century produced exploration accounts that the polar regions and the Arctic in particular as a space that tested and affirmed English ingenuity and resolve. Yet as a space of radical geographical alterity that challenged existent technologies, geopolitical definitions, and human limits, narrative attempts to incorporate them into dominant aesthetic categories or paradigms of conquest and British mastery sometimes fell short. Following the mid‐century disappearance of Sir John Franklin and the exploration ships The Erebus and Terror , print debates about national character arose after evidence of possible cannibalism by the expedition surfaced. The long and expensive search for the Franklin expedition and public debate about its end was responsible in part for the Arctic's persistent presence in popular culture and for its depiction and deployment in literature. Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Brontë, R. M. Ballantyne, and other writers, as well as visual artists and journalists used the Arctic as a representational space in which to rehearse arguments about nation, empire, gender, race, and human endeavor.