Icelandic Utopia in Victorian Travel Literature

Book excerpt: 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.