ABSTRACT
This chapter shifts focus from the early twentieth-century expeditions and the body of literature that has built up around them and instead focuses on the fictional adventure stories written about the Antarctic for children. These stories are often influenced by Antarctic gothic writing from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Drawing on Sigmund Freud and Nicholas Royle the chapter explores how these gothic influences help create a genre in which the Antarctic is persistently positioned as an utterly uncanny space filled with death and the supernatural.
