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  • An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850 by Siobhan Carroll
  • Catherine Redford
An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850. By Siobhan Carroll. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 290. ISBN 978-0-8122-4678-0. £39.00.

While there has been significant critical attention afforded recently to space perception and the shifting understanding of landscape, place, and specific locales in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century literature, less consideration has been given to those spaces that are unknowable: uninhabited, inaccessible, even intangible. Siobhan Carroll’s engaging volume seeks to venture into these inhospitable realms, highlighting the importance of ‘geo-imaginary’ regions [End Page 82] in literature produced during the ‘Romantic century’ of 1750–1850. Leading the reader through the poles, the ocean, the atmosphere, and the subterranean, Carroll examines the significance of these spaces for the British imperial imagination and suggests that contemporary literature triumphantly claimed that which the British Empire remained unable to conquer and colonise.

This volume’s interest in unexplored, uncolonised, and otherwise ‘blank’ spaces focuses exclusively on the ‘atopic’: those regions which are natural and real rather than the stuff of fantasy, and which are accessible in theory, but which nevertheless resist inhabitation and refuse to be transformed into knowable ‘places’. Carroll is specifically concerned with the representation of these spaces in British literature, arguing that Romantic atopias provided a vocabulary that could be used to address the physical limits, and limitations, of Britain’s relationship with the world.

The first atopic space selected for examination in this volume—the polar regions—is one that was being contested, Carroll suggests, from the late eighteenth century onwards. Long the inspiration for many a fantasy, and a region over which the imagination had previously ‘reigned supreme’, there was a shift during the Romantic century, Carroll argues, in Britain’s perception of the poles as explorers began to enter and understand polar space. The chapter traces how British authors responded to this threat to the positioning of the poles as geo-imaginary by reinfusing this space with connotations of the marvellous and the speculative. After offering a brief history of the poles as an imaginary space—a survey that takes in Cavendish’s The Description of a New World and Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins—Carroll highlights how the voyages of Cook destroyed the myth of Terra Australis Incognita while simultaneously prompting a literary resistance to the intrusion of the British Empire into this space. In a fascinating reading of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Carroll demonstrates how Coleridge presents polar space as fundamentally atopic: impossible to represent empirically and thus resistant to being discovered, documented, and claimed. An examination of the 1831 edition of Frankenstein suggests that this novel consciously reflects upon the problematic role of such literature in stimulating Britain’s interest in the poles, with Carroll reading Walton as unable to heed the advice of the Ancient Mariner and remaining ‘recklessly speculative’ in his invasion of polar space. Turning finally to Dickens’s The Frozen Deep, Carroll considers how, by the mid-nineteenth century, polar speculation and the search for colonial territory had transformed into a spectacle that reinforced ideas of British morality and character.

The second chapter turns to the ocean as an atopic space that was considered dangerous, unpredictable, and ‘antithetical to civilization’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and yet also facilitated Britain’s maritime empire. Carroll sets her argument within the context of Britain’s drive to understand and manage the oceans between 1760 and 1850, and uses maritime writers such as William Falconer and Frederick Marryat to demonstrate how contemporary literature was seen as a means by which to control the ocean, with the so-called ‘language of the sea’ making this geo-imaginary space a reality for land-based readers. Indeed, Carroll positions language as a ‘technology’ that facilitated the preservation of sailors who entered the atopic space of the ocean, and which subsequently led to the growth of a body of maritime texts that used literature to regulate the waves and ‘preserve’ Britain at sea. At the same...

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