Title:
Historical Fiction or Architectural History?: Analyzing the Built Environment of the Imagined North
Historical Fiction or Architectural History?: Analyzing the Built Environment of the Imagined North
Author(s)
Dubois, Samuel
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Abstract
Accounts penned by Western men who explored the North American Arctic in the nineteenth century inspired numerous European novelists. Among them was French author Jules Verne (1828–1905), whose widely translated body of works includes Le pays des fourrures (The Fur Country), published in 1873. This novel, set in 1859, chronicles the expedition of a small group of British traders beyond the Arctic Circle and their interactions with local Inuit communities, native to the region. Despite its human-against-nature narrative, Verne’s book includes rich descriptions of settler-colonial architecture typical of the Arctic during that era, gleaned primarily from firsthand accounts of contemporaneous expeditions in the region. A century later, in 1970, pilot-turned-writer Markoosie Patsauq (1941–2020) authored the first Inuit novel in Canada, Uumajursiutik unaatuinnamut (Hunter with Harpoon). This book is emblematic of a significant shift in Inuit culture, from millennia-long oral traditions to the emergence of written literature. It was subsequently translated into multiple languages and reached a global readership. Drawing on an old Inuit legend, Patsauq’s narrative depicts “life in the old days, not as it appeared to southerners, but as it has survived in the memory of the Inuit themselves” (McGill-Queen’s University Press n.d.). Hunter with Harpoon is a seminal literary work offering valuable insight into Inuit life, space, and architecture in the Arctic before the colonial period. This paper critically compares The Fur Country and Hunter with Harpoon—two prominent historical novels set in the Arctic—to explore how Western and Inuit literatures have traditionally depicted the Arctic built environment in divergent ways. Through historical contextualization and textual analysis, it emphasizes the labor and other human aspects associated with living in nineteenth-century structures in the Arctic. Moreover, this study shows the importance of interdisciplinarity, in this case mixing architectural history and literary studies, to uncover the potential value and biases of historical fiction as a legitimate source of knowledge in historical research. Fundamentally, this paper argues that the critical examination of the imagined North can deepen our understanding of Arctic history and its built environment.
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Date Issued
2025-03
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Text
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Proceedings
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