Exploring the frozen past to rethink our warming future

Do we really know what cold is? In Arcticologies, Lowell Duckert delves into early modern European texts to trace how representations of frigidity from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have contributed to historical understandings of climate and contemporary debates on climate change. Arguing that human culture and science are, in fact, indebted to the cold, Duckert suggests that these early depictions offer critical terms for advancing the aims of climate-change activism and assisting in counterapocalyptic thinking.

An imaginative and intellectual journey, Arcticologies reveals the enduring role of cold in wide-ranging storytelling traditions. It draws on Shakespeare's Hamlet and Othello and the works of Thomas Dekker, RenE Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes and is informed throughout by contemporary Indigenous writing, including that of Sheila Watt-Cloutier and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. In reflecting on these assorted accounts, Duckert sees cold as not only an environmental hardship but a source of cultural creativity and resilience, highlighting moments of collaboration between humans and the icy world, from arctic exploration to urban fairs on frozen rivers.

Cold, Duckert makes clear, is more than the absence of warmth. Situating our contemporary obsession with impending planetary meltdown within the mazelike arcticologies of the past, Duckert shows how early modern cold brought about forms of curiosity, vocabulary, and interspecies relationality that can serve us today. In doing so, he asks us to identify what has been lost and who is at risk in today's thinning cold-while also urging us to imagine alternative futures focused not on inevitable and total collapse but on adaptation and preserving what remains.

About the Author

Lowell Duckert is associate professor of English at the University of Delaware. He is author of For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes and coeditor of Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire and Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking, all from Minnesota.

Reviews

"This fascinating, often lyrical book probes the enduring relevance of early modern encounters with cold in our increasingly overheated world. Lowell Duckert's careful readings and playful riffs reveal the agency of language, enabling insights to crystallize and accumulate like hoarfrost or blown snow." - Jesse Oak Taylor, author of The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf

"In this inventive, nimble meditation on early modern conceptions of the cold, Lowell Duckert animates the experiential, figurative, categorical, ontological, and elementary qualities of coldness and the North. Arcticologies is as fluent in contemporary environmental humanities conversations as it is in early modern literary study, and its delight in the language of coldness will in turn delight readers." - Hester Blum, author of The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration

Book Information
ISBN 9781517913588
Author Lowell Duckert
Format Paperback
Page Count 376
Imprint University of Minnesota Press
Publisher University of Minnesota Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm * 19mm