- Paperback: 388 pages
- Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (July 30 1999)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0312220812
- ISBN-13: 978-0312220815
- Product Dimensions: 2.1 x 1.4 x 0.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 363 g
- Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #620,093 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
What on earth could inspire so many men--so many British men, in particular--to brave unimaginable cold, hunger, fear, and physical danger in the planet's most remote and forbidding locales? In the case of many polar explorers, writes Francis Spufford, it was a complicated amalgam--English notions of sportsmanship, heroism, and honor mixed with romantic notions of the sublime. In his I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, Spufford explores the British obsession with the world's coldest and bleakest climes, using their literary representation as his guide. Although his book gives some historical background about early polar explorations, Spufford concerns himself more with English perceptions of snow and ice than with the snow and ice itself. He considers the writing of Byron, Coleridge, Tennyson, Melville, Mary Shelley, and others, as well as that of the polar explorers themselves, expertly limning how coldness and its metaphors captured the imagination of a generation of Englishmen. Along the way Spufford examines exploration's often unsavory ideological bedfellows, including Victorian views about class, race, and empire.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
Spufford, of the Guardian in London, plumbs the cultural fascination and aesthetic attraction of cold regions for British explorers, and how their romance with snow was fashioned by an evolving national sensibility, in this smartly argued, wide-ranging book. The polar regions--with their isolation, nullity of landscape, cold so extreme that ``the breath of the travellers crystallizes and falls to the snow in showers''--were explored by many nations (not to mention the Inuit, who lived there), but by none more than the superbly ill-experienced British. Cook, Franklin, Scott, Shackleton--what drove these men to the ends of the earth, wondered Spufford, ``Why do these insane things?'' Well, he answers, it's more than just a passing fancy. Drawing on the diverse works of Byron, Coleridge, Cruikshank, the Shelleys, Conrad, and many others, the author paints an extraordinary portrait of a culture shaped by the notion of cold and its representations. A yearning for the sublime, for sights great and terrible, played a part, as did the strength of soul necessary to tangle with the most hellacious elements--to brush with them, or even to be utterly beaten by them, was to be touched in a rare way. There were the uncertainty and filtered truths from which spring romance and fantasy. There was the chance for the explorers to distinguish themselves, to shoulder a heroic mantle. Each chapter is an archaeology of the British love affair with ice, Spufford often unearthing unattractive strata: the class nature of exploration, colonialism, racism toward the Inuit, who undercut all the heroism by the simple fact that they lived where the explorers more often died. Spufford elegantly details how all these images, elements, and metaphors came home to roost in the Edwardian imagination, leading directly to parts unknown. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
We had better begin with the question asked by every reader of the standard accounts of the great expeditions, the urgent question that floats irresistibly to the surface of one's mind as the contrast grows stronger and stronger between the safe, sensible surroundings in which one is reading, and the scenes that are being described. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
We had better begin with the question asked by every reader of the standard accounts of the great expeditions, the urgent question that floats irresistibly to the surface of one's mind as the contrast grows stronger and stronger between the safe, sensible surroundings in which one is reading, and the scenes that are being described. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
Pretentious - moi?,
By
This review is from: I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (Paperback)
Relentlessly prolix, unbearably sententious, I found reading this book like climbing out a snowdrift - hard work! There are whole pages without a paragraph and my skipping techniques were tested to the utmost. What a pity - the history of polar exploration is a fascinating subject that deserves better treatment: perhaps Mr Spufford is trying too hard. Within the heaps of slush there are a few nuggets of, if not gold, then silver plate, but most are contained in the last chapter, which takes some getting to! All told, a classic Don't Buy.
4.0 out of 5 stars
I began to think then that things were getting a bit serious,
By A Customer
This review is from: I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (Paperback)
If you have come this far into the Antarctic you've already read Lansing,Mawson, Scott, Shack, Cherry-Garrard, and Lashly. So those trudging first person narratives that caught your attention have given over to the Huntford style management critic, you got that. And here with Spufford you arrive at the analytical pole. This is not a discussion of technique nor tactics but from the South Center you can look in all directions at religion, music, poetry, myth, media; and the very power of precedence to both push and pull men. Here is the geography that makes otherwise hard practical men simply and ultimately spiritual; the deserts frozen or not, hold horizons of nothing that fill mens' heads with everything. Beyond this is to dream and hallucinate; try a little Vollmann. Enjoy the ride. PS. The last chapter of this book is worth its price; 48 pages of the best in the language on Scott and his men.
2.0 out of 5 stars
A disappointing read,
By A Customer
This review is from: I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (Paperback)
Spufford's book has plenty of ice, but not a great deal of imagination. He's a fair writer, and manages to touch on all the right themes, but the bulk of the book is a disteneded prelude to the paean to Scott.
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