Introduction: Northwest passages and exploration cultures; 1. Arctic archives: Victorian relics, sites, collections; 2. Exploration, publication, and inscription in the Age of Murray; 3. Building upon disaster: adventurers in Hudson Bay; 4. The famous mark of our discovery: social authorship and arctic inscriptions; 5. Broken lands and lost relics: the Victorian rediscovery of the early modern Arctic; Epilogue: Franklin found and lost.
This fascinating study examines how Victorian fixation on disastrous Northwest Passage expeditions has conditioned our understanding of the Arctic and Polar exploration.
Adriana Craciun is Presidential Chair at the University of California, Riverside. Her books include Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge, 2003), British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (2005), The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences (with Simon Schaffer, forthcoming in 2015), and several collections and editions.
'In Writing Arctic Disaster, Craciun seeks to historicize the
Victorian obsession with the man, the expedition, and its various
inscriptions, uncovering in the process the changing approaches to
Arctic voyaging and authorship that shaped European understanding
of the region from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. …
Craciun's approach is richly interdisciplinary.' Katherine Parker,
Eighteenth Century Studies
'Every so often a book comes along which is strikingly original.
Adriana Craciun's Writing Arctic Disaster is one of these. … In
both seeing through the eyes of the past as if it were contemporary
and in her exploration and analysis of subsequent cultural memory,
Craciun's work stands out. This is one amazing book.' Murray
Pittock, The BARS Review
'… a rich store of ideas, evidence, and interpretation in how
exploration cultures can be understood, as well as how,
historically, methodologically, and theoretically, there is still
much to grapple with and make sense of … In a little over 200
pages, readers get a clear view of how truly, in the sense of
exploration cultures and the writings within them, it really was a
case of, 'In the beginning was the Word' (John 1:1) - to take a
line out of the King James Bible … [the text] compel[s] us, as
readers, to move further away from past misreadings and missed
readings and closer to more nuanced understandings of this complex
past, as well as its continuing effects' Deborah Stiles, Journal of
Canadian Studies
'Craciun's emphasis on Arctic exploration cultures is a welcome
addition to contemporary, multidisciplinary scholarship on British
Arctic exploration, which, as Craciun notes, is both rich and
wide-ranging, encompassing archival periodical studies, theatrical
events, popular novels, and - increasingly - indigenous
perspectives as well.' Stephanie L. Schatz, BSLS Reviews
'The importance of the book extends beyond the Arctic itself:
pushing the boundaries of what literary criticism can contribute to
the study of non-fictional prose and material culture, this book
will appeal to readers with interests as diverse as print and
manuscript culture,spatiality, exhibition culture, imperialist
discourse, cultural memory, the materiality of texts, travel
writing, geopolitics, authorship, and cultural geography. Writing
Arctic Disaster is a landmark study deserving of the highest
praise.' Johannes Riquet, Prose Studies
'In a superb and subtle analysis of the relationship between print
and material culture, Craciun reveals the ways in which the mania
for collection and display of relics and debris from from his last
expedition cemented popular enthusiasm for the idea of the Arctic
as a place of disaster.' Penny Russell, Victorian Studies
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