Download or read book Hrafnkel Or the Ambiguities written by William Ian Miller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Ian Miller presents a close reading of one of the best known of the Icelandic sagas, showing its moral, political, and psychological sophistication. His account of this complex and nuanced saga corrects simplistic readings which have governed interpretation of the saga in the past.
Download or read book Emotion Violence Vengeance and Law in the Middle Ages written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions to this Festschrift for the renowned American legal and literary scholar William Ian Miller reflect the extraordinary intellectual range of the honorand, who is equally at home discussing legal history, Icelandic sagas, English literature, anger and violence, and contemporary popular culture. Professor Miller's colleagues and former students, including distinguished academic lawyers, historians, and literary scholars from the United States, Canada, and Europe, break important new ground by bringing little-known sources to a wider audience and by shedding new light on familiar sources through innovative modes of analysis. Contributors are Stuart Airlie, Theodore M. Andersson, Nora Bartlett, Robert Bartlett, Jordan Corrente Beck, Carol J. Clover, Lauren DesRosiers, William Eves, John Hudson, Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Kimberley-Joy Knight, Simon MacLean, M.W. McHaffie, Eva Miller, Hans Jacob Orning, Jamie Page, Susanne Pohl-Zucker, Amanda Strick, Helle Vogt, Mark D. West, and Stephen D. White.
Download or read book Outrageous Fortune written by William Ian Miller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-02 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, William Ian Miller offers his reflections on the perverse consequences, indeed often the opposite of intended effects, of so-called 'good things'. Noted for his remarkable erudition, wit, and playful pessimism, Miller here ranges over topics from personal disasters to literary and national ones. Drawing on a truly immense store of knowledge encompassing literature, philosophy, theology, and history, he excavates the evidence of human anxieties around scarcity in all its forms (from scarcity of food to luck to where we stand in the eyes of others caught in a game of musical chairs we often do not even know we are playing). With wit and sensitivity, along with a large measure of fearless self-scrutiny, he points to and invites us to recognize the gloomy, neurotic, despondent tendencies of reasonably sentient human life. The book is a careful examination of negative beliefs, inviting an experience of bleak fellow-feeling among the author, the reader and many a hapless soul across the centuries. Just what makes you more nervous, he asks, a run of good luck, or a run of bad?
Download or read book Emotional Alterity in the Medieval North Sea World written by Erin Sebo and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-09-25 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses a little-considered aspect of the study of the history of emotions in medieval literature: the depiction of perplexing emotional reactions. Medieval literature often confronts audiences with displays of emotion that are improbable, physiologically impossible, or simply unfathomable in modern social contexts. The intent of such episodes is not always clear; medieval texts rarely explain emotional responses or their motivations. The implication is that the meanings communicated by such emotional display were so obvious to their intended audience that no explanation was required. This raises the question of whether such meanings can be recovered. This is the task to which the contributors to this book have put themselves. In approaching this question, this book does not set out to be a collection of literary studies that treat portrayals of emotion as simple tropes or motifs, isolated within their corpora. Rather, it seeks to uncover how such manifestations of feeling may reflect cultural and social dynamics underlying vernacular literatures from across the medieval North Sea world.
Download or read book Narrative in the Icelandic Family Saga written by Heather O'Donoghue and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representative of a unique literary genre and composed in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Icelandic Family Sagas rank among some of the world's greatest literature. Here, Heather O'Donoghue skilfully examines the notions of time and the singular textual voice of the Sagas, offering a fresh perspective on the foundational texts of Old Norse and medieval Icelandic heritage. With a conspicuous absence of giants, dragons, and fairy tale magic, these sagas reflect a real-world society in transition, grappling with major new challenges of identity and development. As this book reveals, the stance of the narrator and the role of time – from the representation of external time passing to the audience's experience of moving through a narrative – are crucial to these stories. As such, Narrative in the Icelandic Family Saga draws on modern narratological theory to explore the ways in which saga authors maintain the urgency and complexity of their material, handle the narrative and chronological line, and offer perceptive insights into saga society. In doing so, O'Donoghue presents a new poetics of family sagas and redefines the literary rhetoric of saga narratives.
Download or read book Narrating Law and Laws of Narration in Medieval Scandinavia written by Roland Scheel and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disputes lie at the heart of the sagas. Consequently, literary texts have been treated as sources of legal practice – narrations of law – while the sagas themselves and the handling of legal matters by the figures adhere to ‘laws of narration’. The volume addresses this intricate relationship between literature and social practice from the perspective of historians as well as philologists. The contributions focus not only on disputes and their solution in saga literature, but also on the representation of law and its history in sagas and Latin historiography from Scandinavia as well as the representation of laws and norms in mythological texts. They demonstrate that narrations of law provide an indispensable insight into legal culture and its connection to a wider framework of social norms, adjusting the impression given by the laws. The philological approaches underline that the narrative texts also have an agenda of their own when it comes to their representation of law, providing a mirror of conduct, criticising inequity, reinforcing the political and juridical position of kings or negotiating norms in mythological texts. Altogether, the volume underlines the unifying force exerted by a common fiction of law beyond its letter.
Download or read book Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland written by Oren Falk and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians spend a lot of time thinking about violence: bloodshed and feats of heroism punctuate practically every narration of the past. Yet historians have been slow to subject 'violence' itself to conceptual analysis. What aspects of the past do we designate violent? To what methodological assumptions do we commit ourselves when we employ this term? How may we approach the category 'violence' in a specifically historical way, and what is it that we explain when we write its history? Astonishingly, such questions are seldom even voiced, much less debated, in the historical literature. Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland: This Spattered Isle lays out a cultural history model for understanding violence. Using interdisciplinary tools, it argues that violence is a positively constructed asset, deployed along three principal axes - power, signification, and risk. Analysing violence in instrumental terms, as an attempt to coerce others, focuses on power. Analysing it in symbolic terms, as an attempt to communicate meanings, focuses on signification. Finally, analysing it in cognitive terms, as an attempt to exercise agency despite imperfect control over circumstances, focuses on risk. Violence and Risk in Medieval Iceland explores a place and time notorious for its rampant violence. Iceland's famous sagas hold treasure troves of circumstantial data, ideally suited for past-tense ethnography, yet demand that the reader come up with subtle and innovative methodologies for recovering histories from their stories. The sagas throw into sharp relief the kinds of analytic insights we obtain through cultural interpretation, offering lessons that apply to other epochs too.
Download or read book Emotions as Engines of History written by Rafał Borysławski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-23 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeking to bridge the gap between various approaches to the study of emotions, this volume aims at a multidisciplinary examination of connections between emotions and history and the ways in which these connections have manifested themselves in historiography, cultural, and literary studies. The book offers a selected range of insights into the idea of emotions, affects, and emotionality as driving forces and agents of change in history. The fifteen essays it comprises probe into the emotional motives and dispositions behind both historical phenomena and the ways they were narrated.
Download or read book Masculinities in Old Norse Literature written by Gareth Lloyd Evans and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020-07-17 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compared to other areas of medieval literature, the question of masculinity in Old Norse-Icelandic literature has been understudied. This is a neglect which this volume aims to rectify. The essays collected here introduce and analyse a spectrum of masculinities, from the sagas of Icelanders, contemporary sagas, kings' sagas, legendary sagas, chivalric sagas, bishops' sagas, and eddic and skaldic verse, producing a broad and multifaceted understanding of what it means to be masculine in Old Norse-Icelandic texts. A critical introduction places the essays in their scholarly context, providing the reader with a concise orientation in gender studies and the study of masculinities in Old Norse-Icelandic literature. This book's investigation of how masculinities are constructed and challenged within a unique literature is all the more vital in the current climate, in which Old Norse sources are weaponised to support far-right agendas and racist ideologies are intertwined with images of vikings as hypermasculine. This volume counters these troubling narratives of masculinity through explorations of Old Norse literature that demonstrate how masculinity is formed, how it is linked to violence and vulnerability, how it governs men's relationships, and how toxic models of masculinity may be challenged.
Download or read book Animal Human Relationships in Medieval Iceland written by Harriet Jean Evans Tang and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Domestic animals played a range of roles in the imaginative world of medieval Icelanders: from partners in settlement and household allies, to violent offenders, foster-kin and surrogate wives, they were vital and effective members of the multispecies communities established from the ninth century onwards. This book examines the domestic animals of early Iceland in their physical and textual contexts, through detailed analysis of the spaces and places of the Icelandic farm and farming landscape, and textual sources such as The Book of Settlements, the earliest Icelandic laws, and various episodes from the Sagas and Tales of Icelanders. Taking a multidisciplinary approach to animal-human relationships, it sees animals not solely as symbols, metaphors, or objects, but as subjects in affective relationships with their human co-settlers who become the focus of intense exploration, delight, anxiety and condemnation in later textual narratives. By inviting readers to question how these sources form, embrace, or reject animal-human relationships, it provides a resource for understanding these archaeological sites and textual narratives differently: as products of multispecies communities in which animals and humans lived, worked, and died together.ect animal-human relationships, it provides a resource for understanding these archaeological sites and textual narratives differently: as products of multispecies communities in which animals and humans lived, worked, and died together.ect animal-human relationships, it provides a resource for understanding these archaeological sites and textual narratives differently: as products of multispecies communities in which animals and humans lived, worked, and died together.ect animal-human relationships, it provides a resource for understanding these archaeological sites and textual narratives differently: as products of multispecies communities in which animals and humans lived, worked, and died together.
Download or read book Law Book Culture in the Middle Ages written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law | Book | Culture in the Middle Ages takes a detailed view on the role of manuscripts and the written word in legal cultures, spanning the medieval period across western and central Europe.
Download or read book Nordic Elites in Transformation c 1050 1250 Volume III written by Wojtek Jezierski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the practical and symbolic resources of legitimacy which the elites of medieval Scandinavia employed to establish, justify, and reproduce their social and political standing between the end of the Viking Age and the rise of kingdoms in the thirteenth century. Geographically the chapters cover the Scandinavian realms and Free State Iceland. Thematically the authors cover a wide palette of cultural practices and historical sources: hagiography, historiography, spaces and palaces, literature, and international connections, which rulers, magnates or ecclesiastics used to compete for status and to reserve haloing glory for themselves. The volume is divided in three sections. The first looks at the sacral, legal, and acclamatory means through which privilege was conferred onto kings and ruling families. Section Two explores the spaces such as aristocratic halls, palaces, churches in which the social elevation of elites took place. Section Three explores the traditional and novel means of domestic distinction and international cultural capital which different orders of elites – knights, powerful clerics, ruling families etc. – wrought to assure their dominance and set themselves apart vis-à-vis their peers and subjects. A concluding chapter discusses how the use of symbolic capital in the North compared to wider European contexts.
Download or read book An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders written by Carl Phelpstead and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-06-17 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining an accessible approach with innovative scholarship, An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders provides up-to-date perspectives on a unique medieval literary genre that has fascinated the English-speaking world for more than two centuries. Carl Phelpstead draws on historical context, contemporary theory, and close reading to deepen our understanding of Icelandic saga narratives about the island’s early history. Phelpstead explores the origins and cultural setting of the genre, demonstrating the rich variety of oral and written source traditions that writers drew on to produce the sagas. He provides fresh, theoretically informed discussions of major themes such as national identity, gender and sexuality, and nature and the supernatural, relating the Old Norse-Icelandic texts to questions addressed by postcolonial studies, feminist and queer theory, and ecocriticism. He then presents readings of select individual sagas, pointing out how the genre’s various source traditions and thematic concerns interact. Including an overview of the history of English translations that shows how they have been stimulated and shaped by ideas about identity, and featuring a glossary of critical terms, this book is an essential resource for students of the literary form. A volume in the series New Perspectives on Medieval Literature: Authors and Traditions, edited by R. Barton Palmer and Tison Pugh
Download or read book Bloodtaking and Peacemaking written by William Ian Miller and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dubbed by the New York Times as "one of the most sought-after legal academics in the county," William Ian Miller presents the arcane worlds of the Old Norse studies in a way sure to attract the interest of a wide range of readers. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking delves beneath the chaos and brutality of the Norse world to discover a complex interplay of ordering and disordering impulses. Miller's unique and engaging readings of ancient Iceland's sagas and extensive legal code reconstruct and illuminate the society that produced them. People in the saga world negotiated a maze of violent possibility, with strategies that frequently put life and limb in the balance. But there was a paradox in striking the balance—one could not get even without going one better. Miller shows how blood vengeance, law, and peacemaking were inextricably bound together in the feuding process. This book offers fascinating insights into the politics of a stateless society, its methods of social control, and the role that a uniquely sophisticated and self-conscious law played in the construction of Icelandic society. "Illuminating."—Rory McTurk, Times Literary Supplement "An impressive achievement in ethnohistory; it is an amalgam of historical research with legal and anthropological interpretation. What is more, and rarer, is that it is a pleasure to read due to the inclusion of narrative case material from the sagas themselves."—Dan Bauer, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Download or read book Outrageous Fortune written by William Ian Miller and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, William Ian Miller offers his reflections on the perverse consequences of so-called 'good things.' With wit and sensitivity, along with a large measure of fearless self-scrutiny, he points to and invites us to recognize the gloomy, neurotic, despondent tendencies of reasonably sentient humanity.
Download or read book Samuel Pepys and His Books written by Kate Loveman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This study uses [Pepys's] surviving papers to examine reading practices, collecting, and the exchange of information in the late 17th century"--Back cover.
Download or read book Postcolonial Ecologies written by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolonial literature, this volume offers rich and suggestive ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing from texts from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific Islands and South Asia. Turning to contemporary works by both well- and little-known postcolonial writers, the diverse contributions highlight the literary imagination as crucial to representing what Eduoard Glissant calls the "aesthetics of the earth." The essays are organized around a group of thematic concerns that engage culture and cultivation, arboriculture and deforestation, the lives of animals, and the relationship between the military and the tourist industry. With chapters that address works by J. M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Zakes Mda, and many others, Postcolonial Ecologies makes a remarkable contribution to rethinking the role of the humanities in addressing global environmental issues.
