As a setting for juvenile literature, the Arctic has traditionally been a space for adventure, the exotic and the fantastic. More recent works have used the Arctic setting to explore a dystopian future, often related to climate change. The aim of the present volume is to examine themes in Arctic juvenile fiction from the early nineteenth century until today. The deceptive image of the Arctic as geographically uniform seems to promise a cultural coherence, but the collection illustrates the diversity of Arctic literature by critically discussing and comparing works written by visitors and settlers as well as by indigenous peoples. The chapters combine macro- and micro-perspectives to interrogate and illuminate the role of Arctic literature for young readers in creating, maintaining and increasingly challenging Arctic myths and motifs.

Ireland and the North is an edited collection of chapters engaging with the relationship between Ireland and the Nordic countries. As a spatial and geographical point of reference for the formation of political and cultural identities in Ireland, the idea of "the North" encourages the identification of overlooked connections between Ireland and the Nordic countries, which, like Ireland, are also small nation states on the periphery of Europe. Importantly, the book employs a double conceptualisation of "the North" to include Northern Ireland. Moving beyond the nation state as a key framework for analysis of human activity, this collection engages with the transnational and transcultural in a mapping of connectivity and exchange. Relationships explored are imaginary and material exchanges, civic and personal linkages, literary adaptation and appropriation, transfers of cultural artefacts, political institutions and ideas. Chapters are drawn from a wide-ranging field of study that includes art history, literary history and theory, archaeology, antiquarianism, and media studies in addition to political analysis. With three sections on Material Culture, Political Culture and Print Culture, the book moves beyond the predominant literary paradigm in Irish Studies to make a significant contribution to expanding and developing the field.

The eruption of rural distress in Ireland and the foundation of the Land League in 1879 sparked a number of novels, stories and plays forming an immediate response to what became known as the Irish Land war. These works form a literary genre of their own and illuminate both the historical events themselves and the material conditions of reading and writing in late nineteenth-century Ireland. Divisions into 'us' and 'them' were convenient for political reasons, but the fiction of the period frequently modifies this alignment and draws attention to the complexity of the land problem. This collection includes studies of canonical land war novels, publication channels, collaborations between artists and authors, literary conventions and the interplay between personal experience and literary output. It also includes unique resources such as a reprinted letter by the author Mary Anne Sadlier and a reproduction of Rosa Mulholland's little-known play Our Boycotting. The book concludes with a detailed bibliography of land war fiction between 1879 and 1916, which should inspire further reading and research into the genre.

As a setting for juvenile literature, the Arctic has traditionally been a space for adventure, the exotic and the fantastic. More recent works have used the Arctic setting to explore a dystopian future, often related to climate change. The aim of the present volume is to examine themes in Arctic juvenile fiction from the early nineteenth century until today. The deceptive image of the Arctic as geographically uniform seems to promise a cultural coherence, but the collection illustrates the diversity of Arctic literature by critically discussing and comparing works written by visitors and settlers as well as by indigenous peoples. The chapters combine macro- and micro-perspectives to interrogate and illuminate the role of Arctic literature for young readers in creating, maintaining and increasingly challenging Arctic myths and motifs.

Emily Lawless is one of the most important of Ireland's forgotten women writers. From a Protestant ascendancy background, she combined nationalist feelings with unionist sympathies. This important new study argues that her own term, "interspace," can be used to explain her vision of Ireland and her position as an Anglo-Irish woman writer determined to resist categorization or stock solutions at a time of polarization and cultural transition. This is the first comprehensive study of the writing of Emily Lawless (1845-1913) and includes biographical information, letters, and contemporary reception as well as analyses based on present-day theoretical approaches, especially feminist criticism and cultural geography. The study begins with a presentation of Lawless's family background, her social circle and a description of her literary career, including how her works have been received up until the present. Her early fiction, novels and stories set outside Ireland are then explored and successive chapters deal with her landscape writing and her novels about the west of Ireland, her negotiations with the voice of authority in historical and biographical writing, her historical fiction and her three collections of poetry. The concluding chapter argues that the contradictory aspects of her writing are an effect of her desire to avoid categorization.

This collection contains new readings of nineteenth-century Irish women's prose works by a wide range of international scholars. The authors place nineteenth-century women's writing in new contexts and offer a fresh view of the nineteenth century through women's literary perspectives. The authors covered include: Elizabeth Hamilton, Lady Blessington, Selina Bunbury, Mrs Hungerford, M.E. Francis, Somerville and Ross. The authors look at writers who have been previously ignored in Irish Studies and they draw attention to women's contributions to literary genres commonly associated with male writers. Serious attention is also given to devalued genres such as the romance. The authors also examine prose writing that does not fit the usual categories and they research the cultural and material contexts of women's literary production. The authors read nineteenth-century Irish women's works according to the main themes that emerge in the novels and texts, not according to any overarching principle based on aesthetic or ideological criteria. This means that the contexts in which women's writing are usually understood are often changed. The designation 'Irish' is widened so that writers whose works were important in Ireland but who themselves did not live there have been included, although most of the writers discussed lived in various parts of Ireland.