Frozen Landscapes, Imperial Dreams: The Arctic in 19th-Century Fiction and Non-Fiction Narratives

This thesis investigates how British imperial discourse constructed the Arctic landscape through textual and visual representations in 19th-century fiction and non-fiction narratives. Combining corpus linguistics and postcolonial theory, the study analyses two purpose-built corpora – the British Arctic Expedition Corpus (BAEC) and the Arctic Fiction Corpus (AFC) – using Sketch Engine to examine how the word 'ice' acquires linguistic agency across genres. Drawing on scholars such as Pratt and Chakrabarty, the research argues that the Arctic functioned as a 'contact zone' where Western epistemological supremacy encountered its 'provincial' limitations. The methodological framework integrates a multimodal examination of Edward Lawton Moss's chromolithographs from "Shores of the Polar Sea" (1878), applying Kress and van Leeuwen's visual grammar to explore how images reinforce and occasionally subvert imperial spatial hierarchies.