Abstract
The article discusses the concept of « borealism », elaborated by analogy with Edward Said’s « orientalism », and the way it might be applied to the works of three French language scholars from the second half of the nineteenth century who visited the north of Scandinavia as well as North Africa and the Middle East. The travelogues from trips to Lapland and to Algeria by the botanist Charles Martins and the philologist Xavier Marmier, both members of La Recherche-expedition (1838-1839), are examined in the first place. The essay of Belgian historian and traveler Eugene Goblet d’Alviella, Sahara and Lapland (1873) completes the picture. The similarities and differences in the discursive and imaginary structures of the texts, describing geographically and culturally distant territories (even seen as opposite according to the North/South paradigm), show in each case the importance of the context of utterance (historical, ideological, individual) and make it possible to evaluate the methodological validity of the concept « borealism ».
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