Jan Borm is presenting a paper: “To be Subject to the Winter in Labrador: Two Missionary Accounts from the 19th and early 20th Century in Comparison” at the conference “The Season of Winter in Literature and Visual Art”, 22-23 September 2025 at the University of Umeå and on-line.
The Arctic winter has stimulated what one might term utopian and dystopian visions in literary representations. Accounts of the search for the North-West passage and wintering in the circumpolar regions strongly impacted the European imagination of the Arctic in the 19th century. Even today, the region is still prone to projections considering it to be cold and somewhat hostile, Stefansson’s «friendly Arctic » trope and climate change notwithstanding. In my presentation, I will discuss two missionary representations of winter in Labrador: an account of a dog-sled ride in the 1860s by the Moravian missionary Theodore Bourquin (1833-1914) and the 1918-19 published journal of Reverend Henry Gordon (1887-1971) entitled A Winter in Lapland (1919 ?). Both texts draw on Christian rhetorics of the edifying tale while presenting first-hand experiences of what both authors describe as “severe” conditions. They are both survival tales and a testimony to winter conditions that are a constitutive part of Indigenous cultural continuity or what Sheila Watt-Cloutier has termed “the right to be cold”.
The symposium is co-organized by Heidi Hansson, Malin Isaksson, Maria Lindgren Leavenworth (Department of Language Studies, University of Umeå) and Daniel Chartier (International Laboratory for Research on Images of the North, Winter and the Arctic, Université du Québec à Montréal, in cooperation with the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la littérature et la culture au Québec).
Program
Monday September 22nd and Tuesday 23rd, 2025
University of Umeå (Sweden)
22 September
HumF.232
University of Umeå
12.00-13.00 Lunch
13.15-13.45 Heidi Hansson
Umeå University (Sweden)
“Feelgood Fiction and Winter as Hyper-Reality”
13.45-14.15 Malin Isaksson
Umeå University (Sweden)
“Winter as Character in Le dernier Lapon [Forty days without shadow] (2012) by
Olivier Truc”
14.15-14.45 Elena Lindholm
Umeå University (Sweden)
“Boreal Winter as Escapist Fantasy in Latin American Literature”
Coffee
15.15-15.45 Alexis Metzger
École de la nature et du paysage (France)
“Painting Winter (17th–19th Centuries): An Interpretation by a Geographer-Climatologist”
15.45-16.15 Lennart Pettersson
Umeå University (Sweden)
“Some Aspects of the Meanings of Snow in Visual Arts”
16.15-16.45 Eang-Nay Theam
Collège de Maisonneuve, Québec (Canada)
“Representations of Winter in Women's Stories of Immigration to Québec”
18.30 Dinner
23 September
HumF232
University of Umeå (Sweden)
9.15-9.45 Jan Borm
Université de Versailles—Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (France)
“To be Subject to the Winter in Labrador: Two Missionary Accounts from the 19th and early 20th Century in Comparison”
9.45-10.15 Maria Lindgren Leavenworth
Umeå University (Sweden)
“The Snow Child in Winter”
Coffee
10.45-11.15 Riikka Rossi
University of Helsinki (Finland)
“Winter Moods: Perspectives from Finnish Literature”
11.15-11.45 Claude Hauser
Université de Fribourg (Switzerland)
“Winterity and Verticality: Crossroads. From the Conquered and Sublime Peaks to the New Sensibilities of a Winter Mountain“
