This book offers an important contribution to the growing body of multidisciplinary scholarship on the Arctic. While books such as Jen Hill's White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination (Albany, NY, 2008) and Eric Wilson's The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination (New York, 2003) examine the Arctic in nineteenth-century elite literature, Cavell's work focuses on the representation of the major nineteenth-century British journeys into the Arctic in the periodical press from the establishment The Times and Quarterly Review to working-class radical papers such as the Mirror and the Literary Chronicle. Cavell argues convincingly that it was through the periodical press that most Britons followed the Arctic voyages; her attention to the full range of the century's periodicals gives much needed breadth to our understanding of the representations of the Arctic quest. Cavell's comprehensive account of the integral role played by the periodical press is informed by her argument that “it is in the public sphere of journalism and reader response that the full meaning of Arctic exploration as a cultural phenomenon is to be found” because “periodical literature was not a mere reflection of nineteenth-century culture, but rather [quoting Marilyn Butler] ‘culture's medium’” (8).

Cavell argues that the periodical literature of the Arctic should not be considered “background material” but the central medium of Arctic exploration narratives. Perhaps one of the most illuminating insights provided by this book's detailed examination of the periodical literature of the Arctic is into the shifting political uses of the Arctic by different publications throughout the era of exploration. Students of the Arctic are probably familiar with the early essays in the Quarterly Review from 1818 onward by John Barrow, who wrote romance narratives of national government-funded heroism but are likely less familiar with the liberal and radical journalists of the 1850s who used the Arctic to write opposition narratives critiquing the government's perceived neglect of a popular cause, that of searching for the lost explorer Sir John Franklin. Cavell's attention to the wide range of periodical press coverage of the Arctic, particularly the more obscure publications, gives us a richer sense of the politics of the Arctic throughout the nineteenth century.

Cavell is a historian trained in Canada who provides in her introduction an illuminating overview of Canadian critiques of Arctic studies. These critiques have not been significantly represented in Anglo-centric Arctic studies. Cavell's purpose is actually to challenge Canadian theorists who critique British Arctic studies and posit that Canadians have a privileged perspective on the history of Arctic exploration because, in the words of Richard Davis, they “have an excellent grasp on the reality of the Arctic” (6). Cavell points out that such “a dichotomy between Canadian reality and British illusion” in the Canadian critiques is theoretically incoherent. She argues instead that both British and Canadian discourses of the Arctic are just that—discourses—and must be analyzed as such. Cavell's intended intervention in Canadian Arctic studies would be stronger if she had integrated it more fully in the entire study and especially if she had elaborated on it in her book's conclusion by showing the payoff of her book's argument for discourse analysis of the Arctic.

Cavell's interdisciplinary ambition for the book is not always fully realized. A literary critic might find her use of discourse analysis somewhat simplistic. Cavell analyzes the first half of the Arctic narrative, from 1818 through the 1830s, as a romance, primarily defining romance with reference to Sir Walter Scott, and here a deeper engagement with the literary scholarship of Arctic narratives, including Wilson's book cited above, as well as articles by Piper, Levy, and my own, would enrich Cavell's articulation of the romance of polar exploration. A survey of exploration narratives in the introduction was unnecessary (being well canvassed elsewhere) and included an inaccurate assertion of “the eighteenth-century mania for perfect grammar and elegant style” as an explanation for Hawkesworth's involvement in the production of Cook's voyage narratives. The inverted chronology of the book's organization (after the introduction, the book begins with a chapter titled “The End of the Epic, 1859–1860” and then returns to 1818 in chap. 2, continuing chronologically thereafter) did not do justice to the book's account of an Arctic narrative that develops and changes over time.

Tracing the Connected Narrative is especially valuable in its detailed and thorough account of the role played by the British periodical press in nineteenth-century Arctic exploration. Cavell's account of the use of the Arctic narrative by the opposition radical press was for me the book's most important contribution. As Cavell rightly notes, the role of the periodical press throughout the century has been underestimated by scholars of Arctic studies, and it is a more complex and nuanced role than we knew before we had Cavell's study.