Heidi Hansson

The gentleman's north: Lord Dufferin and the beginnings of Arctic tourism

In his 1857 travelogue Letters from High Latitudes, Lord Dufferin positions himself as the first real tourist in the region of Iceland and Spitsbergen. The representation of these sites as tourist destinations involves a female gendering of place in comparison with the masculine image of the Arctic conveyed in, for instance, exploration narratives. The narrative is more an instance of self-writing than a report of observations, a privatising, subjective mode which again signals a move away from the pseudo-objective, masculine genres of scientific writing. Dufferins aristocratic outlook is an important aspect of the self-presentation, emphasising the writers refinement and good breeding. Nevertheless, one of Dufferins central concerns is to convey the romance of the Arctic which builds on the image of man pitted against the forces of harsh and dangerous nature. The text can consequently be viewed as a site where conflicting gendered narrative traditions fuse or collide.

Arctopias : the Arctic as No Place and New Place in fiction

In fiction written from the outside, i. e., not by the indigenous population, an Arctic setting has long been used to emphasise the tough and heroic qualities of predominantly male main characters. The primary genres have been adventure stories and thrillers, with the region depicted as a natural rather than a social world. But there is also a counter-tradition where the Arctic is perceived as the route to or the place of an alternative world. Such utopian, or Arctopian works, appear in the nineteenth century when Arctic exploration maintained public interest and seem to reappear in the form of so-called cli-fi or climate fiction today. The works usually describe new forms of social organisation, and as a result, they contribute to changing persistent ideas about the Arctic as pristine nature. At the same time, genre characteristics rely on conventional ideas of the Arctic as empty space, which means that fantasies of the region continue to play a comparatively important role, despite increasing knowledge about actual conditions.

Fictions of the Irish Land War

The eruption of rural distress in Ireland and the foundation of the Land League in 1879 sparked a number of novels, stories and plays forming an immediate response to what became known as the Irish ...

Staging the Arctic 1819-1909 and 2014

Throughout the long nineteenth century and beyond, outside representations of the Arctic on stage have circulated a stereotypical image of the region. The two most long-standing emblems are ice and indigenous culture, and as commodity, the Arctic is identified as mystical, authentic, natural and pre-modern. These images are circulated in popular, cultural events like theatre performances, panoramic displays, music hall shows, and musical comedy but their presence in a popular cultural context also contributes to destabilise the signifiers. At the best, theatre productions about the Arctic may produce a kind of history from below, including a cautious critique of the colonial project and the ideal of heroic masculinity. Their radical potential should not be overstated, however, since the historical meanings of the stereotypes even when they are being debunked. At least on stage, conventional images of the Arctic continue to dominate.

Lady Audley's Secret, Gender and the Representation of Emotions

The relationship between gender, emotion and normative ideals is a prominent theme in British sensation fiction of the 1860s, and a central concern in Mary Elizabeth Braddons novel Lady Audleys Secret (1862). But despite critical assent concerning the importance of emotions in the text, there are no focused studies of their meaning and narrative function. This study explores how representations of anger and shame convey gender specificity, and how the way characters express and perform emotions interplays with constructions of social power in the novel. Braddons work contains more examples of women than men exhibiting signs of anger and more instances of men than women showing shame, which means that anger might be understood as a female and shame as a male quality in the text. The contexts where these emotions occur indicate the opposite, however. Women displaying anger are shown to transgress gendered conduct codes, whereas men mostly experience shame because of womens misbehaviour and as their guardians. Although the distribution of instances when male and female characters show anger or shame could initially be understood as a manifestation of the disruptive qualities of the sensation genre, such an interpretation is undermined by the gendered relations between emotional expression, power and control in the novel.