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July 2021The World of the North
Between Ragnarok and welfare utopia: A cultural-historical deconstruction
by Bernd Henningsen
— Analysis of how we view Europe's North and how this image emerged — An outsider's perspective on Nordic societies and their self image — Serves as an introduction into Northern European culture and society Our image of Northern Europe has been shaped by projections and desires in the long history of encounters: berserkers and war atrocities, bad weather, beautiful nature, stable political systems, social welfare, equality and prosperity, peacefulness, low corruption, hygge and Bullerby – all this is part of the Nordic narrative. But what about the religious, linguistic and ethnic homogeneity, what about the muchvaunted Nordic cooperation? How do politics "work" in the North? Why are Northern Europeans the happiest people?
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2024Russian strategy in the Middle East and North Africa
by Derek Averre
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Humanities & Social SciencesMay 2025The Caucasus Emirate
Ideology, identity, and insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus
by Mark Youngman
Insurgency has plagued the North Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Between 2007 and 2015, rebels waged their struggle under the banner of the Caucasus Emirate (Imarat Kavkaz, IK). This book systematically examines the IK's ideology to explain what the group claimed to be fighting for and against and how it sought to mobilise people behind its cause. It reveals a group with a weakly developed political programme, which aligned itself with global jihadism but consistently prioritised local concerns. It demonstrates the priority rebel leaders afforded to shaping local identities, but also their failure to forge a unified movement or revitalise armed struggle. Re-evaluating the IK's ideology helps us better understand the past and future of armed struggle in the North Caucasus.
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Literature & Literary StudiesDecember 2019Reimagining North African immigration
by Véronique Machelidon, Patrick Saveau
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2025Arctic state identity
Geography, history, and geopolitical relations
by Ingrid A. Medby
This book sets out to answer what it means to hold a formal title as one of the eight 'Arctic states'; is there such a thing as an Arctic state identity, and if so, what does this mean for state personnel? It charts the thoughtful reflections and stories of state personnel from three Arctic states: Norway, Iceland, and Canada, alongside analysis of documents and discourses. This book shows how state identities are narrated as both geographical and temporal - understood through environments, territories, pasts and futures - and that any identity is always relational and contextual. As such, demonstrating that to understand Arctic geopolitics we need to pay attention to the people whose job it is to represent the state on a daily basis. And more broadly, it offers a 'peopled' view of geopolitics, introducing the concept and framework of 'state identity'.
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The ArtsJuly 2004Looking North
Northern England and the national imagination
by David Russell, Jeffrey Richards, Martin Hargreaves
Investigating areas as diverse as travel literature, fiction, dialect, the stage, radio, and television, feature film, music and sport, this fascinating book assesses the attitudes and portrayal of the North of England within the national culture and how this has impacted upon attitudes to the region and its place within notions of 'Englishness'. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2020Defense of the West
by Stanley R. Sloan, Lawrence Freedman
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2022Crossing borders and queering citizenship
Civic reading practice in contemporary American and Canadian writing
by Zalfa Feghali
Can reading make us better citizens? In Crossing borders and queering citizenship, Feghali crafts a sophisticated theoretical framework to theorise how the act of reading can contribute to the queering of contemporary citizenship in North America. Providing sensitive and convincing readings of work by both popular and niche authors, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Dorothy Allison, Gregory Scofield, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Erín Moure, Junot Díaz, and Yann Martel, this book is the first to not only read these authors together, but also to discuss how each powerfully resists the exclusionary work of state-sanctioned citizenship in the U.S. and Canada. This book convincingly draws connections between queer theory, citizenship studies, and border studies and sheds light on how these connections can reframe our understanding of American Studies.
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Literature & Literary StudiesSeptember 2024The mediated Arctic
Poetics and politics of contemporary circumpolar geographies
by Johannes Riquet
The mediated Arctic analyses the multiple relations between geography and cultural production that have long shaped - and are currently transforming - the circumpolar world. It explores how twenty-first-century cultural practitioners imagine and poeticise various elements of Arctic geography, and in doing so negotiate pressing environmental, (geo)political, and social concerns. From the plasmatic force of ice in Disney's Frozen films to the spatial vocabulary of circumpolar Indigenous hip hop, it addresses Arctic geographical imaginaries in a wide range of media, including literature, cinema, comic books, music videos, and cartographic art. The book brings together a plurality of voices from within and outside the circumpolar North, both in terms of the works analysed and in its own collaborative scholarly practice. The book bridges Indigenous and Southern mediations of the Arctic and combines different epistemologies to do justice to these imaginaries in their diversity.
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Literature & Literary StudiesJuly 2022Nordic Gothic
by Maria Holmgren Troy, Johan Hõglund, Yvonne Leffler, Sofia Wijkmark
Nordic Gothic traces Gothic fiction in the Nordic region from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, with a main focus on the development of Gothic from the 1990s onwards in literature, film, TV and new media. The volume gives an overview of Nordic Gothic fiction in relation to transnational developments and provides a number of case studies and in-depth analyses of individual narratives. It creates an understanding of this under-researched cultural phenomenon by showing how the narratives make visible cultural anxieties haunting the Nordic countries, their welfare systems, identities and ideologies. Nordic Gothic examines how figures from Nordic folklore function as metaphorical expressions of Gothic themes and Nordic settings are explored from perspectives such as ecocriticism and postcolonialism. The book will be of interest to researchers and post- and- undergraduate students in various fields within the Humanities.
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Humanities & Social SciencesNovember 2024Anti-racism in Britain
Traditions, histories and trajectories, 1880-present
by Saffron East, Grace Redhead, Theo Williams
Concepts of 'race' and racism are central to British history. They have shaped, and been shaped by, British identities, economies and societies for centuries, from colonialism and enslavement to the 'hostile environment' of the 2010s. Yet state and societal racism has always been met with resistance. This edited volume collects the latest research on anti-racist action in Britain, and makes the case for a multifaceted, historically contingent 'tradition' of British anti-racism shaped by local, national and transnational contexts, networks and movements. Ranging from Pan-Africanist activism in the 1890s to mutual aid women's groups in the 1970s, from anti-racist trade union marches in Scotland to West African student groups in North East England - this book explores the continuities and interruptions in British anti-racism from the nineteenth century to the present day.
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Biography & True StoriesMay 2025Mrs Dalloway
Biography of a novel
by Mark Hussey
A compelling biography of one of the most celebrated novels in the English language. The fourth and best-known of Virginia Woolf's novels, Mrs Dalloway is a modernist masterpiece that has remained popular since its publication in 1925. Its dual narratives follow a day in the life of wealthy housewife Clarissa Dalloway and shell-shocked war veteran Septimus Warren Smith, capturing their inner worlds with a vividness that has rarely been equalled. Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a novel offers new readers a lively introduction to this enduring classic, while providing Woolf lovers with a wealth of information about the novel's writing, publication and reception. It follows Woolf's process from the first stirrings in her diary through her struggles to create what was quickly recognised as a major advance in prose fiction. It then traces the novel's remarkable legacy to the present day. Woolf wrote in her diary that she wanted her novel 'to give life & death, sanity & insanity. to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense.' Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a novel reveals how she achieved this ambition, creating a book that will be read by generations to come.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017The French empire at War, 1940–1945
by Martin Thomas
The French empire at war draws on original research in France and Britain to investigate the history of the divided French empire - the Vichy and the Free French empires - during the Second World War. What emerges is a fascinating story. While it is clear that both the Vichy and Free French colonial authorities were only rarely masters of their own destiny during the war, preservation of limited imperial control served them both in different ways. The Vichy government exploited the empire in an effort to withstand German-Italian pressure for concessions in metropolitan France and it was key to its claim to be more than the mouthpiece of a defeated nation. For Free France too, the empire acquired a political and symbolic importance which far outweighed its material significance to the Gaullist war effort. As the war progressed, the Vichy empire lost ground to that of the Free French, something which has often been attributed to the attraction of the Gaullist mystique and the spirit of resistance in the colonies. In this radical new interpretation, Thomas argues that it was neither of these. The course of the war itself, and the initiatives of the major combatant powers, played the greatest part in the rise of the Gaullist empire and the demise of Vichy colonial control.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017
The Arctic in the British imagination 1818–1914
by Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie, Rob David
The Arctic region has been the subject of much popular writing. This book considers nineteenth-century representations of the Arctic, and draws upon an extensive range of evidence that will allow the 'widest connections' to emerge from a 'cross-disciplinary analysis' using different methodologies and subject matter. It positions the Arctic alongside more thoroughly investigated theatres of Victorian enterprise. In the nineteenth century, most images were in the form of paintings, travel narratives, lectures given by the explorers themselves and photographs. The book explores key themes in Arctic images which impacted on subsequent representations through text, painting and photography. For much of the nineteenth century, national and regional geographical societies promoted exploration, and rewarded heroic endeavor. The book discusses images of the Arctic which originated in the activities of the geographical societies. The Times provided very low-key reporting of Arctic expeditions, as evidenced by its coverage of the missions of Sir John Franklin and James Clark Ross. However, the illustrated weekly became one of the main sources of popular representations of the Arctic. The book looks at the exhibitions of Arctic peoples, Arctic exploration and Arctic fauna in Britain. Late nineteenth-century exhibitions which featured the Arctic were essentially nostalgic in tone. The Golliwogg's Polar Adventures, published in 1900, drew on adult representations of the Arctic and will have confirmed and reinforced children's perceptions of the region. Text books, board games and novels helped to keep the subject alive among the young.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2020Defense policies of East-Central European countries after 1989
by James W. Peterson, Jacek Lubecki
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The ArtsFebruary 2019Contemporary Korean cinema
Culture, identity and politics
by Hyangjin Lee
The first in-depth, comprehensive study of Korean cinema offering original insight into the relationships between ideology and the art of cinema from East Asian perspectives. Combines issues of contemporary Korean culture and cinematic representation of the society and people in both North and South Korea. Covers the introduction of motion pictures in 1903, Korean cinema during the Japanese colonial period (1910-45) and the development of North and South Korean cinema up to the 1990s. Introduces the works of Korea's major directors, and analyses the Korean film industry in terms of film production, distribution and reception. Based on this historical analysis, the study investigates ideological constructs in seventeen films, eight from North Korea and nine from South Korea.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2024
Migration diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa
by Gerasimos Tsourapas
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Literature & Literary StudiesFebruary 2020Nordic Gothic
by Maria Holmgren Troy, Johan Hõglund, Yvonne Leffler, Sofia Wijkmark, Jerrold Hogle
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