"Scholars and laymen alike have long projected their fantasies onto the great expanse of the global North, whether it be as a frozen no-man's-land, an icy realm of marauding Vikings, or an unspoiled cradle of prehistoric human life. Bernd Brunner reconstructs the encounters of adventurers, colonists, and indigenous communities that led to the creation of a northern "cabinet of wonders" and imbued Scandinavia, Iceland, and the Arctic with a perennial...

A wall in the distant north cuts the world in two. Ruthless sea-born warriors raid the coasts from their war galleys, yearning to regain lost glories. A young nobleman and his kin are slaughtered under a banner of truce within a mighty castle. A warrior king becomes a legend when he smites his foe with one swing of his axe during a nation-forging battle. Yet this isn't Westeros — it's Scotland. Game of Thrones is history re-imagined as fantasy;...

How the First World War influenced the author of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy: “Very much the best book about J.R.R. Tolkien that has yet been written.” —A. N. Wilson As Europe plunged into World War I, J. R. R. Tolkien was a student at Oxford and part of a cohort of literary-minded friends who had wide-ranging conversations in their Tea Club and Barrovian Society. After finishing his degree, Tolkien experienced the horrors of the Great War...

Part of the "Lives and Legacies" series, this volume places this influential American poet, Walt Whitman, in his historical contexts.

The author of this text examines the popular theatres of the day in which Shakespeare and his company first produced "Hamlet" and discusses the genre of tragedy in which it is written. The work aims to provide contexts for understanding "Hamlet"'s melancholy, and the theme for revenge.

From the very outset in the West, the epic has been a highly regarded literary genre. Major epics had the most profound and most enduring cultural influence. This course revisits major epics examing the stories and the characters, while considering the styles represented ad the societies in which the epics were constructed. The course examines the epic as genre and as a reflection of ancient history.

One of America's most celebrated women, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her own time and unknown to the public at large. Today her poetry is commonly anthologized and widely praised for its precision, its intensity, its depth and beauty. Dickinson's life and work, however, remain in important ways mysterious. This collection of essays, all of them previously unpublished, represent the best of contemporary scholarship and points the way...

This historical guide collects a number of original essays by Hawthorne scholars that place the author in historical context. It includes a brief biography and illustrated chronology of the author's life and times.