The News at the Ends of the Earth

The Print Culture of Polar Exploration

Hester Blum (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

328 Seiten

2019
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4780-0387-8 (ISBN)

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Hester Blum examines the rich, offbeat collection of printed ephemera created by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century polar explorers, showing how ship newspapers and other writing shows how explores wrestled with questions of time, space, and community while providing them with habits to survive the extreme polar climate.

From Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 search for the Northwest Passage to early twentieth-century sprints to the South Pole, polar expeditions produced an extravagant archive of documents that are as varied as they are engaging. As the polar ice sheets melt, fragments of this archive are newly emergent. In The News at the Ends of the Earth Hester Blum examines the rich, offbeat collection of printed ephemera created by polar explorers. Ranging from ship newspapers and messages left in bottles to menus and playbills, polar writing reveals the seamen wrestling with questions of time, space, community, and the environment. Whether chronicling weather patterns or satirically reporting on penguin mischief, this writing provided expedition members with a set of practices to help them survive the perpetual darkness and harshness of polar winters. The extreme climates these explorers experienced is continuous with climate change today. Polar exploration writing, Blum contends, offers strategies for confronting and reckoning with the extreme environment of the present.

Hester Blum is Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, author of The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives, and editor of Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion and Horrors of Slavery: Or, The American Tars in Tripoli.

List of Illustrations vii
Chronology xi
Preface: Books on Ice xv
Acknowledgments xxi
Introduction. Polar Ecomedia 1
1. Extreme Printing 43
2. Arctic News 91
3. Antarctic Imprints 138
4. Dead Letter Reckoning 177
5. Inuit Knowledge and Charles Francis Hall 209
Conclusion. Matters of Life and Death 231
Notes 237
Bibliography 273
Index 291

Erscheinungsdatum	18.04.2019
Zusatzinfo	62 illustrations
Verlagsort	North Carolina
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	454 g
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik ► Natur / Ökologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-4780-0387-1 / 1478003871
ISBN-13	978-1-4780-0387-8 / 9781478003878
Zustand	Neuware