Privileging the visual as the main method of communication and meaning-making, this book responds critically to the worldwide discussion about the Arctic and the North, addressing the interrelated issues of climate change, ethics and geopolitics. A multi-disciplinary, multi-modal exploration of the Arctic, it supplies an original conceptualization of the Arctic as a visual world encompassing an array of representations, imaginings, and constructions. By examining a broad range of visual forms, media and forms such as art, film, graphic novels, maps, media, and photography, the book advances current debates about visual culture. The book enriches contemporary theories of the visual taking the Arctic as a spatial entity and also as a mode of exploring contemporary and historical visual practices, including imaginary constructions of the North. Original contributions include case studies from all the countries along the Arctic shore, with Russian material occupying a large section due to the country’s impact on the region

The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism offers a new perspective on American literary naturalism that considers those under-researched aspects of the genre that can be gathered under the term the Nonhuman. The contributors, an international team of scholars, have turned their attention to that which becomes visible when the human subject is skirted, or perhaps, temporarily at least, moved off-center: in other words, the representation of nonhuman animals and other vital or inert species, things, entities, cityscapes and seascapes, that also appear and play an important part in American literary naturalism. Informed by animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, new materialism, and other recent theoretical and philosophical perspectives, the essays in this collection discuss early naturalist texts by Norris, Crane, Dreiser, London, Wharton and Cather, as well as more recent followers in the tradition of American literary naturalism: Hemingway, Agee & Evans, Petry, Hamilton, Dick, Vonnegut, Tepper, and DeLillo. The collection responds to a need to expand and refine the connections among nonhuman studies and texts associated with American literary naturalism and to productively expand the scholarly discourse surrounding this vital movement in American literary history.