Romanticism and Ice

Journée d’études organisée par Pauline Hortolland (CRIT, Université Marie et Louis Pasteur) et Patrick Vincent (Université de Neuchâtel).

Présentation

The aim of this workshop is to shed new light on the Romantic fascination with ice in literature and visual arts. This keen interest in ice manifests itself in the numerous representations of Alpine glaciers and polar landscapes during the long Romantic period. Among the many writers and painters who represented ice in one form or another, one may cite Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“Hymn Before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni”, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), Percy Shelley (“Mont Blanc”), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, The Last Man), Lord Byron (Manfred), Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre) [1] and Caspar Friedrich (The Polar Sea, later known as The Sea Ice).

Ice formation and glaciation were seen as mysterious processes until the 1840s, and the science of glaciology only appeared in the last decades of the 19th century. In the wake of James Cook’s great expeditions in the 1770s, William Hodges’s paintings turned ice sheets into a popular and fascinating subject for Romantic audiences. Recent studies have confirmed the influence of “the heroic age of Arctic exploration” on the social imagination, more particularly John Franklin’s expeditions in search of the Northwest passage from 1818 to 1845 (Craciun). [2] In the Alps, pioneers of mountain geology including Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, Louis Agassiz and James Forbes helped explain the formation and movement of glaciers and advanced the theory of an “Ice Age”, in turn helping push back the limits of time (Heringman).

Building on this rich historical context, the workshop aims to consider Romantic-period representations of ice and their afterlives through an aesthetic and ecocritical lens. A wholly alien landscape devoid of shape, color, and movement, the ice landscape not only challenges the parameters of aesthetic representation but also calls into question humanity’s ambition to exploit its natural resources. Recent analyses of influential accounts made by 18th-century missionaries to Greenland (Moss) have questioned more established readings of Romantic representations of ice (including Alpine glaciers) as the ultimate example of the sublime (Davidson, Wilson), foregrounding instead the Romantic fantasy of domesticating ice as a potentially habitable place. [3] However, in Romantic representations of glaciers and polar landscapes, human beings often stand on the edge of the world rather than at its center and are immersed in the immanence of a complex network of interactions that reveals the agency of non-human environmental forces.