Local Americanists: Hester Blum, "Writ upon Ice: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration"

Local Americanists Lecture Series: "Writ upon Ice: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration," Hester Blum, Penn State University.Respondent: Sarah Sillin, Department of English, University of Maryland.

This talk examines the print culture of polar exploration, particularly on the newspapers and other materials written and, strikingly, printed in the Arctic and Antarctic by expedition members. Blum will discuss the first newspaper produced in the polar regions: the North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle, which circulated in manuscript by members of William Parry's 1819–20 Arctic expedition. The story of how and why sailors actively created their own literary culture while icebound is arresting on its own terms. Of greater interest for the sake of this presentation, however, is the tension between the global ambitions of such voyages, and the remarkably circumscribed conditions of their practice.

Blum is Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and the author of The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Sillin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Maryland.

1107 Tawes Hall; reception to follow.