Incarnations of fatal women, or femmes fatales, recur throughout the works of women writers in the Romantic period. Adriana Craciun demonstrates how portrayals of femmes fatales or fatal women played an important role in the development of Romantic women's poetic identities and informed their exploration of issues surrounding the body, sexuality and politics. Craciun covers a wide range of writers and genres from the 1790s through the 1830s. She discusses the work of well-known figures including Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as lesser-known writers like Anne Bannerman. By examining women writers' fatal women in historical, political and medical contexts, Craciun uncovers a far-ranging debate on sexual difference. She also engages with current research on the history of the body and sexuality, providing an important historical precedent for modern feminist theory's ongoing dilemma regarding the status of 'woman' as a sex.

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In August 2013 the Canadian governmentlaunched its largest search for the ships, relics, and records of the John Franklin expedition, which disappeared with all 129 hands lost searching for the Northwest Passage in 1845. Canada's latest search was its fifth in six years, one of dozens of search expeditions launched since 1848, in a well-known story of imperial hubris elevated to an internationalcause célèbre. Recent work in nineteenth-century literary and visual culture has shown the significant role that Franklin played in the Victorian popular imagination of the Arctic (see Spufford, Potter, David, Hill, Cavell, Williams, Savours, MacLaren). In panoramas, stereographs, paintings, plays, music, lantern shows, exhibitions, and popular and elite printed texts, record numbers of Britons could enjoy at their leisure the Arctic sublime in which Franklin's men perished. Alongside this work on how Europeans represented Arctic peoples and places, we also have a growing body of Inuit oral histories describing their encounters with nineteenth-century Arctic explorers. Drawing on these traditional histories of British exploration, visual culture, and literary imagination, and on postcolonial, anthropological and indigenous accounts that shift our attention away from the Eurocentrism of exploration historiography, and toward the “hidden histories of exploration,” this essay uncovers an unexamined material dimension of these encounters – the “Franklin Relics” collected by voyagers searching for Franklin.

This essay argues that the undertheorized “Explorer” was a later nineteenth-century back-formation, and not the origin of exploration practices and texts. Comparing diverse early nineteenth-century Greenland voyages to 1730s geodetic expeditions, we can see how and why the Explorer began to appear at the turn of the nineteenth century. The distinct regulatory and corporate domains, predisciplinary vantage points, and bibliographic codes, through which exploration accounts were produced often differed radically from those in commercial authorship in the long eighteenth century. I suggest that the commonplace identification of Explorer with the proprietary commercial Author is misleading, and that it provides an opportunity for discerning asynchronous strands in the history of authorship and print.

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