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

• 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.