Overview

As a setting for juvenile literature, the Arctic has traditionally been a space for adventure, the exotic and the fantastic. More recent works have used the Arctic setting to explore a dystopian future, often related to climate change. The aim of the present volume is to examine themes in Arctic juvenile fiction from the early nineteenth century until today. The deceptive image of the Arctic as geographically uniform seems to promise a cultural coherence, but the collection illustrates the diversity of Arctic literature by critically discussing and comparing works written by visitors and settlers as well as by indigenous peoples. The chapters combine macro- and micro-perspectives to interrogate and illuminate the role of Arctic literature for young readers in creating, maintaining and increasingly challenging Arctic myths and motifs.

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9781032174563

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"Heidi Hansson received her PhD from Umeå University, Sweden, with the dissertation ""Romance Revived: Postmodern Romances and the Tradition"" in 1998. She is Professor of English Literature at the same university and currently serves as Deputy Vice Chancellor. She has published widely on images of the North and the Arctic in travel writing, fiction and popular culture, and has edited, together with Cathrine Norberg, the collection Cold Matters: Cultural Perceptions of Snow, Ice and Cold (2009), and with Anka Ryall, the recent collection Arctic Modernities: The Environmental, the Exotic and the Everyday (2017). Maria Lindgren Leavenworth is Associate Professor of English Literature in the Department of Language Studies, Umeå University, Sweden. She received her PhD from the same university with the dissertation The Second Journey: Travelling in Literary Footsteps (2000, revised second edition 2010). Her research with a focus on travel literature and the North has resulted in articles on nineteenth-century travel writers Bayard Taylor and S. H. Kent, and more recently, she has examined contemporary speculative fictions set in the Arctic by Dan Simmons and Michelle Paver. Anka Ryall is Professor Emerita at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, where she previously taught English Literature. Among her publications are several books on travel writing and gender, while her latest book (in Norwegian) deals with Virginia Woolf's literary border crossings. She has published widely on the Arctic as a gendered space in travel writing, been the leader of two international interdisciplinary research programmes on Arctic literature, and co-edited Arctic Discourses (2010) with Johan Schimanski and Henning Howlid Wærp and Arctic Modernities: The Environmental, the Exotic and the Everyday (2017) with Heidi Hansson."

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