RR 2008/326 Scott's Last Biscuit: The Literature of Polar Exploration

摘要

Although travel accounts of people like Ranulph Fiennes and Bear Grylls show no sign of decreasing, there has been a paradoxical increase in books about the literature of polar exploration (that is, the literary and cultural aspects of it) alongside a view that the heroic age of polar exploration is over and has been probably since the First World War. It was at that time when, iconically, Shackleton, after crossing the mountains of South Georgia after his epic journey to Elephant Island, asked whether the war was over. Books of Pontdng's photographs, reprints of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's worst journey in the world, reassessments of Scott and Shackleton, Byrd and Peary and the rest, continue to appear and are widely read. Like the conquest of Everest, these are moments, actions, with which anyone can readily identify. Science and technology, geology and the geopolitics of mineral extraction and territoriality have superseded this almost boy's own world of heroes and derring-do, as numerous studies of the poles show.