Writing Arctic Disaster
Authorship and Exploration

This fascinating study examines how Victorian fixation on disastrous Northwest Passage expeditions has conditioned our understanding of the Arctic and Polar exploration.

Adriana Craciun (Author)

9781107125544, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 10 March 2016

326 pages, 39 b/w illus.
24.4 x 17 x 1.9 cm, 0.72 kg

'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

How did the Victorian fixation on the disastrous John Franklin expedition transform our understanding of the Northwest Passage and the Arctic? Today we still tend to see the Arctic and the Northwest Passage through nineteenth-century perspectives, which focused on the discoveries of individual explorers, their illustrated books, visual culture, imperial ambitions, and high-profile disasters. However, the farther back one looks, the more striking the differences appear in how Arctic exploration was envisioned. Writing Arctic Disaster uncovers a wide range of exploration cultures: from the manuscripts of secretive corporations like the Hudson's Bay Company, to the nationalist Admiralty and its innovative illustrated books, to the searches for and exhibits of disaster relics in the Victorian era. This innovative study reveals the dangerous afterlife of this Victorian conflation of exploration and disaster, in the geopolitical significance accruing around the 2014 discovery of Franklin's ship Erebus in the Northwest Passage.

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.

Subject Areas: Expeditions [WTLP], Geographical discovery & exploration [RGR], Maritime history [HBTM], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]