ABSTRACT
Often neglected in scholarship, this chapter explores the role and significance of touch in literary representations of travel. Drawing on research by Rodaway (1994), McNee (2014) and Forsdick (2015), the chapter examines tactile geographies in a region where multisensory perception is central to navigation and survival: the Antarctic. Focusing on Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (1922) and Sara Wheeler’s Terra Incognita (1996), the chapter considers the shape and impact of contact in the world’s most ‘untouched’ regions, suggesting that in veering between sensation and its loss, the haptic aesthetic demands a certain poetics of tact (Derrida, 2005).
