Icelandic Utopia in Victorian Travel Literature

Dimitrios Kassis

May 2016 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

This book focuses on Iceland as a nineteenth-century utopian locus in the light of racial theories attached to the country’s national framework. In particular, it investigates the ways in which five nineteenth-century travellers define their national identity and gender in relation to Iceland during the Victorian period, during which European nationalism emerges as an idea of paramount importance. Owing to the gradual contemplation of this peripheral word as the cradle of the Germanic nations, Victorian travel writers endeavoured to reconstruct the image of Iceland in accordance with the racial theoretical framework that underlay the nineteenth-century British nation-building agenda.

About the author

Dimitrios Kassis received his PhD from the Faculty of English Studies of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, with a doctoral thesis on Representations of the North in Victorian Travel Literature, (2015). He has received a Master’s degree in Education Studies (with Distinction) from Roehampton University in London, and holds a Master’s degree in Translation Studies from the Department of French Language and Literature of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He speaks 16 foreign languages and his academic interests are connected with travel literature, translation and language studies. He is currently working as a high school teacher in the public sector.