%0 Journal Article 
%A Merola, Nicole M.
%T "For terror of the deadness beyond": arctic environments and inhuman ecologies in Michelle Paver’s "Dark matter"
%D 2014
%@ 2171-9594
%U http://hdl.handle.net/10017/20860
%X In this essay I examine Michelle Paver’s 2010 novel "Dark Matter", a ghost story, for how her use of 
the gothic and horror contributes to undermining pastoral and romantic fantasies about the Arctic. 
Drawing on the history of whale, walrus, and seal hunting in Svalbard, the site of the novel’s 1937 
scientific expedition, and my own experience there, I look at the tension Paver creates between the beauty 
of the Svalbard environment and its long history as a location for human violence against nonhuman 
animals. I suggest that, through the figure of the "gengånger", or “one who walks again,” and the built 
environment and relics in Svalbard, Paver works to transmit both the violence of harvesting marine 
mammals and the violence men perpetrate against each other in the name of resource extraction. In this 
essay I engage in dialogue with recent environmental humanities work on ecophobia, dark ecologies, and 
the ecocritical uses of fear, and argue for the consideration of the ghost story, a genre little studied by 
ecocritics. Through highlighting the novel’s focus on violence linked to extractive practices, I suggest, 
finally, that "Dark Matter" performs two important functions: it records past inhuman ecologies and it opens 
out onto a reading of contemporary Arctic geopolitics.

%K Arctic
%K Ecophobia
%K Ghost story
%K Gothic
%K Resource extraction
%K Violence
%K Ártico
%K Ecofobia
%K Historia de fantasmas
%K Gótico
%K La extracción de recursos
%K La violencia
%K Literatura
%K Literature
%K Medio ambiente
%K Environmental science
%~ Biblioteca Universidad de Alcala