The Poetics of the Antarctic: A Study in Nineteenth-Century American Cultural Perceptions

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...