Loss and Cultural Remains in Performance: The Ghosts of the Franklin Expedition (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History)

In 1845, John Franklin's Northwest Passage expedition disappeared. The expedition left a remarkable archive of performative remains that entice one to consider the tension between material remains and memory, to contemplate how affect influences historical narratives, and to reflect on how substitution and surrogation work alongside mourning and melancholia as responses to loss. This book proposes that performances generate critical insights into how those affected by the expedition's disappearance understood the losses they experienced and makes the broader argument that performance functions as a repository of cultural history and as an epistemology of loss.