Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages

Personal and Public Art and Literature of the Franklin Search Expeditions

Eavan O'Dochartaigh

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781108834339
• eBook ISBN: 9781108998871
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the mid-nineteenth century, thirty-six expeditions set out for the Northwest Passage in search of Sir John Franklin's missing expedition. The array of visual and textual material produced on these voyages was to have a profound impact on the idea of the Arctic in the Victorian imaginary. Eavan O'Dochartaigh closely examines neglected archival sources to show how pictures created in the Arctic fed into a metropolitan view transmitted through engravings, lithographs, and panoramas. Although the metropolitan Arctic revolved around a fulcrum of heroism, terror and the sublime, the visual culture of the ship reveals a more complicated narrative that included cross-dressing, theatricals, dressmaking, and dances with local communities. O'Dochartaigh's investigation into the nature of the on-board visual culture of the nineteenth-century Arctic presents a compelling challenge to the 'man-versus-nature' trope that still reverberates in polar imaginaries today. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations and Nomenclature
• Introduction: Witnessing the Arctic
• Chapter 1 ‘On the Spot’: Scientific and Personal Visual Records (1848–1854)
• Chapter 2 ‘Breathing Time’: On-Board Production of Illustrated Periodicals (1850–1854)
• Chapter 3 ‘These Dread Shores’: Visualising the Arctic for Readers (1850–1860)
• Chapter 4 ‘Never to Be Forgotten’: Presenting the Arctic Panorama (1850)
• Chapter 5 ‘Power and Truth’: The Authority of Lithography (1850–1855)
• Chapter 6 Conclusion: Resonances
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index