Thule Tales: Contemporary Travel Writing and the Idea of North

Thule functions as a  multivalent symbol for both the inherent elusiveness and imaginative freedom of these emotionally febrile northward journeys. Long since a phantasmal traveller's goal, Thule is also a cumulative literary creation, replete with boastful stories claiming to have discovered 'Ultima Thule', the northernmost place in the known world. In this talk, I will use the figure of Thule to look at three recent northern travelogues by the British writers Joanna Kavenna, Gavin Francis, and Peter Davidson. In each case, a journey to the high north (sub-Arctic Europe for Kavenna and Francis, a wide selection of high-latitude locations for Davidson) offers an opportunity to explore northern myths and histories, but also to contemplate the familiar narratives that contain them and, by association, to reflect upon the imaginatively empowering––restorative and regenerative––capacities of travel writing itself.

Graham Huggan is Chair of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK. His most recently published books are the monograph Nature's Saviours: Celebrity Conservationists in the Television Era (Routledge/Earthscan, 2013) and the single-edited Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (OUP, 2013). He is currently involved in a northward journey himself, in the shape of an EU-funded multi-partner research project: 'Arctic Encounters: Contemporary Travel/Writing in the European High North'. UiT is one of the partners.

The guestlecture is hosted by Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art in cooperation with the reaserch project Arctic Encounters: Contemporary Travel/Writing in the European High North and Professor Britt Kramvig, see http://www.arcticencounters.net/.