Famously, Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym breaks off tantalizingly with his travellers being confronted by a huge white shrouded human figure. If this is an embodiment of the mysterious southern land, Poe's final editorial note offers reflections on the inscribed nature of the landscape discovered by Pym, remarking that it will open up a “wide field for speculation and exciting conjecture.” This in effect predicts the subject of Elizabeth Leane's study, which sets out to explore the literary responses to Antarctica. Her scope is actually rather broader than this, however, in that she includes some nonfictional exploration narratives as well as films and other media representations of this vast continent. It was widely perceived, as she notes in her introduction, as being “unwritable” (2) and one of the main strengths of her discussion lies in the way she demonstrates how Antarctica has been constantly reimagined, right up to the present. Because it was explored relatively later than the Arctic, the southern continent has had a shifting, fluid existence for writers, figuring variously as utopia, laboratory, or site of lost races.

Leane's impressive and invaluable bibliography gives us a powerful impression of the sheer range of works she has had to consider. Hence, inevitably, substantial parts of each chapter can only mention individual works in passing. It is a pity that more is not made of the Canadian James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), which clearly exemplifies the hybrid nature of Antarctic texts and which also had an important influence on Margaret Atwood. The core narrative contained in the cylinder, found amongst a group of yachtsmen, describes how a sailor finds himself in a strange southern land inhabited by both an advanced race and primeval monsters. The narrative sets up speculations forwards and backwards in the evolutionary scale which are heatedly debated by the yachtsmen. In other words, A Strange Manuscript gives us a rare example of the fabulous possibilities in the Antarctic which are already examined by the recipients of the core narrative. In each chapter Neale highlights key narratives which helpfully exemplify her local subjects. Kim Stanley Robinson's 1997 novel Antarctica is a wise choice for utopias since it engages with a whole range of issues he develops at greater length in his Mars trilogy: the appropriation and maintenance of an environment, the commercial competition for raw materials, and the use of Antarctica for social experimentation. Robinson presents this continent as a test case for the rest of the world in terms of ecological management, and also, as Neale rightly notes, layers his account with allusions to earlier writings on Antarctica. Robinson researched his novel during a 1995 visit under the auspices of the US Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, an important institutional facility for enabling writers, painters and photographers to work on Antarctica. Apart from Robinson, the AAWP has sponsored writers like Elizabeth Arthur (her novel Antarctic Navigation appeared in 1995) or the prolific Australian writer Meredith Hooper, who has produced a whole series of juveniles, including A for Antarctica (1991).

Neale's grouping of material is sometimes thematic, sometimes done according to literary mode. Thus Antarctic Gothic is predictably demonstrated not only through Poe but also through Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, where icebound scenes reflect the extent of the mariner's estrangement from normal humanity. Poe's presence within this same tradition is, of course, well known, as is his enthusiastic endorsement of Jeremiah Reynolds's call for the US Senate to underwrite exploration of the South Seas. Here another crucial theme emerges in this body of writing, which is noted a number of times by Neale, namely empire. Poe saw the cause of exploration as underpinned by national destiny, which involved nothing less than “our pride as a vigorous commercial empire,” as he stated in his long “South-Sea Expedition” essay of 1837. The drive to explore and appropriate new lands underpins much writing on Antarctica, even the Gothic, and Neale rightly stresses that Pym functions as a proto-text, constantly being rewritten by later authors. Charles Romeyn Dake's A Strange Discovery (1899), for example, describes how an English traveller in Illinois encounters a Poe aficionado, through whom he discovers that Dirk Peters (from Pym) is living nearby. From him he hears a continuation of Poe's novel, recounting Peters's meetings with a cultured race of beings descended from fourth-century refugees from Europe. More famously, explicit bearings from Poe are taken in H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1936), where the extraordinary discoveries made during Antarctic exploration are refracted through parts of a report packed with scientific detail. Lovecraft's biographer, S. T. Joshi, has documented how the novel incorporates elements from earlier Antarctic explorers. Neale's chosen text in this Gothic context is John W. Campbell's famous 1936 story “Who Goes There?”, which dramatizes the extreme claustrophobia of expeditions, while drawing on Coleridge and Byrd. The shapeless shifting identity of the creature in the story could be taken as an emblem of the Antarctic itself. It is revealing that the transposition of setting to the Arctic in the 1951 film adaptation, The Thing from Another World, does more than change continents; it repositions the narrative within the Cold War fears of the period.

In her subsequent chapters Neale examines narratives from the “Heroic Era” of Antarctic exploration from the 1890s to the early 1920s, the most famous instance being that of Captain Scott. Once again the pattern to the literature is one of constant revision. Thus in later versions the emphasis on heroic endurance is brought increasingly into question. T. R. Pearson's Polar (2002) is cited as a displacement of Lawrence Oates's story (famous, according to Scott, for saying “I'm just going outside and may be some time” as he marched to his death) onto present-day Virginia. This work and other revisions show the “faults and failures, blind spots and prejudices of early Antarctic narratives” (96). One of the most interesting sections of Neale's study focusses on the treatment of women. Initially there is an almost complete absence, countered by Ursula Le Guin's 1982 story “Sur,” which purports to be a report on an all-women expedition. The West African writer Mojisola Adebayo's 2008 play Moj of the Antarctic transposes the historical case of Ellen Craft, the African American who in 1848 fled north by posing as a white male planter, and in so doing draws our attention to yet another major theme in Antarctic writing – race. One of the earliest Antarctic novels, and the first to apply Symmes's theory of the Earth being hollow and accessible through polar openings – is Symzonia (1820), by one “Adam Seaborn,” who claims to have sailed through a southern portal into a utopian society inhabited by “fair-skinned people.” This was to set the racial pattern for many subsequent accounts. The Voyage of Will Rogers to the South Pole (1888), “edited” by Christopher Spotswood, similarly describes the encounters of a sailor with a southern race of bearded men “with fair complexion,” but the narrative already shows self-consciousness about its subject in using textual “flowers” (decorative devices) and a typeface redolent of a much earlier period. Mat Johnson's Pym (2010) offers one of the most recent (and satirical) treatments of race in the Antarctic context.

What did Antarctic explorers read? This is one of the more unusual questions answered in Neale's study. The answer is Dickens and poetry anthologies, among other works. Moreover, they even set up newsletters like the South Polar Times and engaged in theatricals, sometimes performing their own works. Within the main line of Antarctic writing Neale explains one of the most recent phases since the 1990s as one of realism. Robyn Mundy's The Nature of Ice (2009) is tied to travel writing, Sarah Wheeler's Terra Incognita (1996) to the notion of Antarctica as a place of renewal, and Liz Maverick's Adventures of an Ice Princess (2002) even makes an excursion into Antarctic chick-lit. Neale's account of these more recent works is always informative. The topics of individual chapters, however, sometimes overlap with each other, partly due to the mixed-genre nature of the texts she is dealing with. Utopias shade into questions of race; the shifting relation between place and time is valid for virtually all pre-1950s Antarctic works and for many since. The use of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) makes an appropriate coda in the sense that the story of two comic-book creators frames a pulp narrative of an expedition to the Antarctic to battle with Nazis, which draws partly on Dennis Wheatley's The Man Who Missed the War (1945).

Although Glasberg's study was published several months after Leane's, she was one of the source critics used by the latter and has been publishing on Antarctica for a number of years. Although there are inevitably some overlaps between the two books, there are plenty of differences, not least in Glasberg's main line of argument. Quite simply, she sees Antarctica as challenging any means used to represent it. In short, the continent defies description, and throughout her volume she skilfully compares written accounts with those in other media from film to photography and even, at one point, a Chrysler advertisement. Thus even a practice like mapping is shown to carry its own distortions and tendency to fragmentation.

In common with Leane, Glasberg focusses on two key texts: Le Guin's “Sur” and Campbell's “Who Goes There?”. In an outstanding piece of extrapolation she uses Le Guin's story to examine the whole concept of “footprints,” arguing that “imperial geography was an elaborate act of leaving marks” (27). The latter might include footsteps or abandoned equipment and in that sense Le Guin questions the whole imperial enterprise by referring to Antarctica as a “blank map” and by privileging the circumstances of discovery over discovery itself. Read in this way, “Sur” makes an intervention in the history of the continent, simultaneously undermining its own status as a hoax.

Another impressive piece of contextualization is carried out with Campbell's “Who Goes There?”, which is related to the Antarctic Treaty System. The ATS was based on the premise that “enlightened science under national programs is the best way to secure Antarctica as a place of value” (55). For Glasberg, the story presents a complex layered view of the continent which has not been brought out by criticism focussing narrowly on the history of the science fiction or horror genres. Instead the narrative has a political point to make in being a “story of contested colonization” (62). The creature in the story could be read as an embodiment of the continent's threatening inscrutability and resistance to scientific control. The subsequent film adaptations question the viability of atomic energy and the feasibility of progress.

Glasberg next turns her attention to the photographers of Antarctica, where she draws contrasts between Herbert G. Ponting, who accompanied the Scott expedition, and Eliot Porter's more recent images. Here she locates a tension between rival images of Antarctica as a pristine unmarked expanse and the increasing signs of human habitation. Questioning the very possibility of representing Antarctica as a bulwark against capital, she examines the photographs of Vietnam-born An-My Le, which repeatedly focus on scenes of abandoned equipment. Glasberg shows that the very defining features of Antarctica, extent and ice alike, challenge representation so severely that the result is often contradiction. Even the attempt to negotiate this expressive problem by positing Antarctic exceptionalism is shown to be tainted by its echoes of US imperialism. Both studies have their respective strengths, not least their joint demonstration of how extensive ways of imagining Antarctica have been. Because they are, of necessity, so selective, they also point up the need for a substantial historical survey of this material.