ABSTRACT
As Kennedy notes, the term 'exploration' first entered popular usage in the mid- to late eighteenth century, with 'explorer' coined later in the nineteenth century. The emergence of the new prestigious term of 'explorer' materialized more or less alongside the mythologizing of the 'frontier' in the work of Frederick Jackson Turner and his 'Frontier Thesis', which documented the role played by the westward expansion of land-grabs in American history, and the concomitant process of Americanization. Although there is a long history of scholarship revolving around the concept of 'the frontier', particularly that which explores it as a key motif in nation-founding myths, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to continually and critically rethinking the meaning of the term. It seems fitting, and a reflection of environmental anxieties, that this inspection of the nature and meaning of frontiers should draw forth, in its third and final theoretical logic, strong intimations of the Anthropocene.
