Defrosting the Gothic: Arctic poetry in a melting sublime

This article traces Gothicised conceptions of the north as a sublime geographical space and argues that as the climate crisis effects material changes on the formerly frozen-solid Arctic, the unheimlich literary topography of the north must also change, from a site of obscure terror to one of exposed horror. I integrate into my paper Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s monster theory and Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, and I suggest adding a revised category to the lexicon of Arctic Sublime. I focus on analysis of poetry by British and Canadian poets whose work engages with the Arctic, including contemporary poetry I classify as ecoGothic within the context of global heating.