The Concept of: Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration

[RonPrice]

For those who would like to have some background to the concept of ages in history, it would be useful to go back to the Greeks: heroic, formative and golden. Geology, too, has its ages,epochs,eras, etc. Some people who post here might like to use these terms in relation to their own lives. My writing, for example is not part of a heroic age of literature, as some argue James Joyce's work was, as far as Ireland and especially Dublin was concerned.

Rather I came to see my writing as part of a formative age. As the four epochs, which were the background for much of my work I was drawn more and more to a comparison of his age with the formative age of Greek institutions down to, say, 800 BC, far back in another heroic and formative period of history. The linking of one's own life, Antarctic exploration, history and geology provides a heuristic mixfor the student. I leave this with any interested student here.-Ron Price with thanks to David Daiches and John Flower, Literary Landscapes of the British Isles: A Narrative Atlas, Paddington Press Ltd., NY, 1979, pp. 214-234.