ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 examines how the Arctic is figured as a site of alternatives: to history, with emphasis on the disappearance of the 1845 Franklin expedition, to geography, in texts that present the area around or beneath the North Pole as home to lost civilizations, and to ontology in novels that trouble the boundaries between real and imagined. At focus is the peripheral position of the Arctic and with possibilities opened up by discourses of both figurative and literal instability.
