Paul Simpson-Housley

This book seeks to provide illustrations of Artic mysteries and fictions which often occur as a result of misconceptions of Artic geography. The chapters are extremely varied in subject matter, and conclusions are in the domain of speculation. The book begins with very early examples of northern travels starting with the probable adventures of Pytheas the Greek, Brendan the Irish monk and the four medieval odysseys of Adam of Bremen, Nicolas of Lynn, Prince Henry Sinclair and Zeno of Venice. No account of polar enigmas would be complete without reference to the Franklin expedition, the possible fate of his lost ships and the debate over whether his men committed cannibalism. The book concludes with a deliberation on whether Cook or Perry actually did reach the North Pole, hinting that perhaps neither of them reached their objective.

Enigmas and Myths

The Arctic

Glen Norcliffe

In 1759, Voltaire in Candide referred to Canada as "quelques arpents de neige." For several centuries, the image prevailed and was the one most frequently used by poets, writers, and illustrators. Canada was perceived and portrayed as a cold, hard, and unforgiving land. this was not a land for the fainthearted. Canada has yieled its wealth only reluctantly, while periodically threatening life itself with its displays of fury. Discovering its beauty and hidden resources requires patience and perseverance. A Few Acres of Snow is a colletion of twenty-two essays that explore, from the geographer’s perspective, how poets, artists, and writers have addressed the physical essence of Canada, both landscape and cityscape. "Sense of place" is clearly critical in the works examined in this volume. Included among the book’s many subjects are Hugh MacLennan, Gabrielle Roy, Lucius O’Brien, the art of the Inuit, Lawren Harris, Malcolm Lowry, C.W. Jefferys, L.M. Montgomery, Elizabeth Bishop, Marmaduke Matthews, Antonine Mailet, and the poetry of Japanese Canadians.

Literary and Artistic Images of Canada

A Few Acres of Snow

A scene so wildly and awfully desolate...it cannot fail to impress me with gloomy thoughts" - so Scott perceived the stark Antarctic landscape in 1905. Antarctica traces images of the continent from early invented maps of Terra Australis Incognita up to Amundsen's arrival at 90 degrees South. Approaching Antarctica from sea and then land, the book analyses the differing perceptions of beauty and terror experienced by explorers, the stories they brought back and the power of new images refashioned at home.

Exploration, Perception and Metaphor

Antarctica

William E. Mallory

Evocative descriptions of geographical places by novelists and poets are of great benefit both to students of literature and geography. They foster a deeper appreciation of the essences of and they frequently allow a sense of place to be felt more strongly by the reader. Geography and Literature is a uniquely interdisciplinary effort. The essays of distinguished creative writers, literary critics, and geographers, appraising literary places, demonstrate that literary landscapes are rooted in reality, and that the geographer's knowledge can help ground even highly symbolic literary landscapes in this reality. The book is divided into five sections, based on various approaches to landscape or place in literature. The domain is wide and includes such diverse areas as José Maria Arguedas's Peru, Turgenev's Russia, Bennett's Stoke-on-Trent, Cather's Nebraska, and Chrétien de Troyes's symbolic Arthurian landscapes. Contributors include César Caviedes, Jim Wayne Miller, Kenneth Mitchell, D. C. D. Pocock, Peter Preston, and Susan J. Rosowski. Students of geography and literature should find the collection useful. The avid student of human, social, cultural, and historical geography will become aware of factors exogamous to geography that stimulate appraisal and appreciation of place-and one of them is literary description. Similarly, the student of literature will gain an awareness of the actual or factual basis of a geographer's appraisal. Ultimately, it is hoped, such a collection can bridge the gap between the geographer's factual descriptions and the writer's flights of imagination, hence giving the world—both in geographical and literary terms—a more unified shape.

A Meeting of the Disciplines

Geography and Literature

Peter Preston

`The expression of human experience it embodies ... includes all personal history'. Saul Bellow's view of the city is far from that of classic geographical descriptions which look at growth or decline, demographic patterns, traffic flows and economic potential: these empirically conceived models of urban geography fail to accommodate the crucial human aspect of city life. Located at the interface of geography and literature, Writing the City visualizes the city through the hopes, aspirations, disappointments and pains of international novelists and creative writers. From Manchester, Montreal and Sydney to Osaka, Varanasi amd Odessa, cities become more than their built environment, more than a set of class or economic relationships: they are also an experience to be lived, suffered and undergone. Thus cities are seen in terms of the innocence of an Eden now lost, a threat of sinful Babylon and the promise of a New Jerusalem.

Eden, Babylon and the New Jerusalem

Writing the City

Jamie S. Scott

Interweaving the interpretative methods of religious studies, literary criticism and cultural geography, the essays in this volume focus on issues associated with the representation of place and space in the writing and reading of the postcolonial. The collection charts the ways in which contemporary writers extend and deepen our awareness of the ambiguities of economic, social and political relations implicated in “sacred space” - the sense of spiritual significance associated with those concrete locations in which adherents of different religious traditions, past and present, maintain a ritual sense of the sanctity of life and its cycles. Part I, “Land, Religion and Literature after Britain,” explores how postcolonial writers dramatize the contested processes of colonization, resistance and decolonization by which lands and landscapes may be viewed as now sacred, now desacralized, now resacralized. Part II, “Sacred Landscapes and Postcoloniality across International Literatures,” draws upon postcolonial theory to inquire into how contemporary fiction, drama and poetry represent themes of divine dispensation, dispossession and reclamation in regions as diverse as Haiti, Israel, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Arctic, and the North American frontier. A critical “Afterword” considers the implications of such multi-disciplinary approaches to postcolonial literatures for present and future research in the field. Writers discussed in the essays include Russell Banks; James K. Baxter; Ursula Bethell; Erna Brodber; Marcus Clarke; Allen Curnow; Edwidge Danticat; Mak Dizdar; Sara Jeannette Duncan; Zee Edgell; “Grey Owl”; Haruki Murakami; Seamus Heaney; Peter Høeg; Hugh Hood; Janette Turner Hospital; James Houston; Dany Laferrière; B. Kojo Laing; Lee Kok Liang; K.S. Maniam; Mudrooroo; R.K. Narayan; Ngugi wa Thiong'o; Ben Okri; Chava Pinchas-Cohen; Mary Prince; Nancy Prince; Nayantara Sahgal; Ken Saro-Wiwa; Ibrahim Tahir; Amos Tutuola; W.D. Valgardson; Derek Walcott; and Rudy Wiebe. Maps accompany almost every essay.

Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures

Mapping the Sacred

Carol Margaret Davison

A collection of essays by some of the world's leading scholars analyzing and celebrating the novel's legacy in popular culture.

Paul Simpson-Housley

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