‘This mystery and nightmare of imagination’: A review of the use of spirits, ghosts, and aliens in Antarctic imaginative writing.

• Main Author: Moffat-Wood, Alex
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: University of Canterbury 2011
• Subjects: Antarctic; The Antarctic; Rime; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10092/13906

As a comparatively unknown space, the Antarctic has provided centuries of writers with the opportunity to tell stories involving ‘otherly presences’ – spirits, ghosts, and aliens. This review examines eleven texts, covering a range of periods, forms, and cultures, from Coleridge’s 1798 poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, to a Russian novel written during the Cold War, to a 2008 American short story. The review examines the nature of the otherly presences in the texts and explores the representations of the Antarctic encoded within them. It then shows how a wider discussion about the nature of knowledge arises from this interaction, in particular debates about objective versus subjective knowledge and the question of dangerous knowledge.