Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North and the Arctic route to Romantic Nationalism seminar, Oct 29th

Wednesday 29 October, 4.15pm
Room 311, University of Westminster, Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Professor Cian Duffy, St Mary’s University
“‘[T]hat voyage will not cease to stir the imagination’: Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North, the Sublime, and the Arctic route to Romantic Nationalism”

This talk will examine the various ways in which Fridtjof Nansen’s celebrated account of his attempt to reach the North Pole in 1893-96 draws upon a Romantic aesthetics of natural sublime in order to formulate arguments about the relationship between social and natural histories. The paper considers Nansen’s contribution to the developing relationship between science writing and literature, the importance of a Romantic construction of the natural sublime to Norwegian nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century, and Nansen’s debts to British as well as Norwegian Romantic writers.