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Northern Europe and North America have dominated the world stage for more than two centuries. Using a wide range of sources, this book provides the first coherent account from a multi-national perspective of the ideas and perceptions that, from the Renaissance onwards, fuelled the North’s rise to prominence, and enabled it to rival the traditional cultural and political hegemony of the South. This includes not only the fascinating conquest of the polar regions, but also the religious upheaval of the Reformation, the changing view of nature engendered by Romanticism, and, not least, the revival of ancient Nordic and Celtic culture. Finally, the book offers an indispensable historical background to current events in the Far North, where the past and the future meet in a complex web of dramatic environmental concerns, the exploitation of natural resources, and the strategies of politics and commerce.
Free, romantic, and individualistic, Britain’s self-image in the eighteenth century constructs itself in opposition to the dominant power of a southern European aesthetics. Offering a fresh understanding of how the British intelligentsia created a ‘Northern’ aesthetics to challenge the European yoke, this book explores the roots of British Romanticism and a newly created past. Literature, the arts, architecture, and gardening all contributed to the creation of this national, ‘enlightened’, Northern cultural environment, with its emphasis on a home-grown legal tradition, on a heroic Celtic past, and on the imagined democracy of King Arthur and his Roundtable of Knights as a propheti...
"Through close analysis of noncanonical Victorian-era literature by Thomas Hardy, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, Constance Naden, and Marianne North, Murphy reveals how women were often marginalized, constricted, and defined as intellectually inferior as a result of the interplay of sociohistorical trends driven by scientific curiosity and the 'Woman Question'"--Provided by publisher.
This book examines translations of Icelandic sagas and the Victorian and Edwardian children's literature they inspired, some of which are canonical while others are forgotten. It covers authors like William Morris, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Gray, Walter Scott, H. Rider Haggard, W.H. Auden, John Greenleef Whittier and more. In lavish volumes and modest schoolbooks, British and American writers claimed Nordic heritage and explored Nordic traditions. The sagas offered a rich and wide-ranging source for these authors: Volsunga saga's Sigurd the dragon slayer; King Olaf's saga of opposing Nordic Gods and Christianity; Frithiof's model of headstrong youth beset with unfair opposition and lost love. Grettir and Njal tell of men who accepted fate and met conflict and enemies unflinchingly; Aslaug, Gudrida, Hallberga and Hervar exerted remarkable influence; and Eric the Red and Leif the Lucky provided Americans with a Nordic heritage of discovery.
The Cambridge sources embody the most recent textual scholarship, and critical references include theoreticians like Gilles Deleuze, Theodor Adorno, and Judith Butler."
In the 19th century, the ancient filial tie' between Britain and Norway was rediscovered by a booming tourist industry which took thousands across the North Sea to see the wonders of the fjords, the fjelds, and the beauties of the North Cape. This illustrated volume, for the first time, collects together vivid impressions of the country recorded by nearly 200 British travellers and other commentators, incl. Thomas Malthus, Charlotte Bronte, and Lord Tennyson"
In the nineteenth century, the ancient ‘filial tie’ between Britain and Norway was rediscovered by a booming tourist industry which took thousands across the North Sea to see the wonders of the fjords, the fjelds, and the beauties of the North Cape. This illustrated volume, for the first time, collects together vivid – and predominantly first-hand – impressions of the country recorded by nearly two hundred British travellers and other commentators, including Thomas Malthus, Charlotte Brontë, Lord Tennyson, and William Gladstone. In a rich selection of travel writing, fiction, poetry, journalism, political speeches, and art, Norway emerges as a refreshingly natural utopia, happily fr...
Fjagesund argues that traditional apocalypticism, or the dialectic between forces of destruction and visions of utopian renewal, forms the mental framework of Lawrence's writings from the First World War onwards. After an introductory chapter on Lawrence's view of history, the author shows how apocalyptic extremes dominate the various periods of his career, from the general sense of doom during the war, via the utopian quest of the early 1920s, to the dual vision of the final years. The book sheds new light on crucial passages of the major prose works by relating them more directly than has previously been done to cultural and political movements on the Continent. As a result, Lawrence emerges as a cosmopolitan writer whose visions and ideas can only be properly understood in a European context.
This study of modernism's high imperial, occult-exotic affiliations presents many well-known figures from the period 1880-1960 in a new light. Modernism and the Occult traces the history of modernist engagement with 'irregular', heterodox and imported knowledge.
In a climate of anxiety about boys and reading, this book addresses the gendering of English Studies, drawing on recent research on masculinity. In drawing together the study of text and narrative with insight into the experience of the classroom, this book will be of value to both teachers and students of English Studies.