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As with the compass needle, so people have always been most powerfully attracted northwards; everyone carries within them their own concept of north. The Idea of North is a study, ranging widely in time and place, of some of the ways in which these ideas have found expression. Peter Davidson explores the topography of north as represented in images and literature, taking in Netherlandic winter paintings of the Renaissance, German Romantic landscapes, Scandinavian Biedermeyer and twentieth-century topographical painting and printmaking. He examines a bewildering diversity of mythologies and imaginings of north, including The Snow Queen; Scandinavian Sagas; ghost-stories; Moomintrolls, Arctic exploration; the fictitious snowy kingdoms of Zembla and Naboland; Nabokov's nostalgias; Baltic midsummer; rooms in winter light; compasses and star-stones; hoar-frost; and, ice and glass. The Idea of North also traces a northward journey, describing northern rural England, industrial sites, and the long emptiness of the borders, Scotland and the Highlands. He looks at the region far north of Scotland, then moves to the Northern Netherlands and Scandinavia to explore their identifiable northernness.The last visited place is Iceland, identified by W. H. Auden and Louis McNeice in 1936 as furthest, most remote, most distant, most northerly'. An engaging meditation on solitude, absence and stillness, The Idea of North shows north to be a goal rather than a destination, a place of revelation that is always somewhere ultimate and austere.
Peter Davidson is Professor of English at the University of Aberdeen. His books include Poetry and Revolution (1998) and Early Modern Women Poets (2001, with Jane Stevenson). He lives on the 57th parallel north, has travelled widely in northern places and has read and translated accounts of north and northernness in many languages.
"An interesting meditation."
– Tom Shippey, Times Literary Supplement, 1/4/2005
"A truly stunning assessment of the concept of 'north' in literature, legend, history and the psyche of "Northern" people. Why do some places feel 'northern'? Peter Davidson writes with an incredible sense of place in the North-east of Scotland."
– Aberdeen Evening Express
"The nearer he gets to the North of England and Scotland the more deeply felt his writing becomes [...] Marvellously sensitive."
– London Review of Books
"Davidson is as interesting writing about snow sculptures and 17th-century paintings of the Arctic as he is about Auden, and his reading of the imaginary land of Zembla in Nabokov's Pale Fire as an enternal, symbolic north is highly evocative [...] a lovely book"
– The Guardian
"The charm of the book is its exhaustiveness, zooming into a variety of touchstones to show how they''ve influenced global culture in sly, often surprising ways [...] The Idea of North is an exhausting book, but in the best sort of way. Davidson tackles so many different ideas about north-ness, both sympathetic and contradictory, that the writing accrues meaning and value as it goes along [...] Davidson's north is an enormous challenging land: humbling, shifting, austere, empty, fragile, desolate, desolating, marginal, authentic – a place, as Davidson perfectly puts it, forever suffused with ''absolute, difficult beauty.''"
– Ruminator
"Provocative [...] Davidson''s evocative prose and sensitive analyses of an impressive range of sources heighten the reader's appreciation of the rich complexity of humanity's imagined Norths."
– Max Jones, Times Higher Education Supplement, 14/7/2006
"Davidson's style [...] achieves a lyrical elegance of phrase [...] he achieves a marvel of descriptiveness that is moving as well as expressive of something irreducibly ''north'', yet universal."
– Tom Adair, The Scotsman, 26/2//2005
"What is the North? Although it's almost always that bit further from wherever you happen to be, Peter Davidson's new study manages to pin down its elusive cultural quality for long enough to offer new insights and lyrical evocations."
– Richard Price, Scotland on Sunday, 16/1//2005
