Reviewed by: White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination Alexandra Neel Hill, Jen. White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008. 246 pp. $60.00. A welcome addition to Francis Spufford’s encyclopedic book I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (1997), Jen Hill’s White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination argues for the inclusion of the Arctic within postcolonial and imperial studies. Moreover, Hill claims that because the Arctic was considered peripheral and “conveniently removed. . .from colonial locations” (12), [End Page 497] it is the ideal space in which to examine the formation of the British national subject and the contours of British imperialism. As she succinctly puts it, “In articles, novels, plays, and poetry, the Arctic was a landscape on which assertions and critiques of nation and empire could unroll at a literal ‘safe distance’” (5). While studies such as Lisa Bloom’s seminal Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (1993) and Robert G. David’s The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818–1914 (2000) have made similar claims about the intimate connection between polar exploration narratives and nationalist discourse, Hill brings new material to the field as well as offers original readings of well-mapped territory, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Indeed, Hill contends that rereading these canonical texts in light of their Arctic content not only yields fresh interpretive paths but also underscores how embedded the novels are within their socio-historical context, namely Romantic and Victorian imperialism and the making of the nationalist imperial subject. After establishing the Arctic as a crucial space in which a nationalist British male identity is constituted, revealed, and challenged in various genres, Hill summarizes the stakes of her subsequent five chapters, which include an examination of “how exploration accounts construct one form of a foundational, nationalistic heroic masculinity” (25); an interpretation of “Jane [Eyre]’s ‘Arctic’ sufferings and her eventual rescue of Rochester,” which, in Hill’s estimation, “reveals the centrality of women to the spatial practices of empire” (26); an exploration of the origins of sensation fiction through an analysis of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins’s fascination with cannibalism and their co-authored Arctic melodrama The Frozen Deep (1857); and a consideration of “the participation in empire by boys’ adventure novels” (26), which in R. M. Ballantyne’s work, “foreshadows the exhaustion of Arctic space in imperial narrative and questions the very logic of boys’ adventure and empire itself” (27). By far the most compelling and original contribution of White Horizon is “introducing Arctic space to larger discussions of the sensation genre,” which, according to Hill, “complicates existing critical discussions of sensation and its relation to domestic space, nationalism, and colonialism” (26). This is such an intriguing theory of the origins of sensation fiction that I would have liked an even lengthier exposition of it. As the argument stands, Hill asserts that plays like Collins and Dickens’s The Frozen Deep reveal that “the profoundly domestic sensation genre has an unlikely genealogy that includes a tradition of using the distant Arctic as a proving ground for male national identity” (142). In part, Hill can make this assertion by “[t]racing one influence on the sensation novel back to Dickens’s Household Words articles on cannibalism and stable national identities through his transformation and extension of the same concerns in his contributions to and performance of The Frozen Deep” (117). Just as Dickens’s articles and melodrama incite a visceral response in his audience through their detailing of inconceivable horrors, so too sensation fiction, which, despite its transgressive tendencies, serves a politically conservative end: the consolidation of national identity. In a way, these broad-stroke claims are precisely the stakes of Hill’s entire book: that is, seemingly insignificant references to the Arctic are crucial in understanding the discourse surrounding national identities in the wake of Britain’s expanding empire. To her credit, Hill does not shy away from answering the question of why the Arctic in particular; she contends that the stark environment reveals the “hidden operations” behind imperial formations: “in...