Playing the Arctic: Arthur Ransome’s Winter Holiday

• Main Author: Schimanski, Johan Henrik
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2020
• Subjects: VDP::Allmenn litteraturvitenskap: 041; Arctic; English Lake
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10852/78538; http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-81607; https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429343704

Inspired by Nansen’s accounts of Arctic journeys, the child protagonists of Arthur Ransome’s Winter Holiday (1933) transform the English lake on which they spend their holidays into the scene of an Arctic expedition. This chapter examines how Winter Holiday uses Arctic discourse to articulate shifts in imperialism and gender roles leading up to inter-war modernity. The novel’s disjunctive mappings of the Lake District onto spaces of exploration, along with the fantasy play within the fiction, produce an ambivalence about imperialism; its adventures and entropic images of the fluidity of the ice and the blizzard create a modernist Arctic.