For four hundred years, Norse settlers battled to make southern Greenland a new, sustainable home. They strove against gales and winter cold, food shortages and in the end a shifting climate. The remnants they left behind speak of their determination to wrest an existence at the foot of this vast, icy and challenging wilderness. Yet finally, seemingly suddenly, they vanished; and their mysterious disappearance in the fifteenth century has posed a riddle to scholars ever since. What happened to the lost Viking colonists? For centuries people assumed their descendants could still be living, so expeditions went to find them: to no avail. Robert Rix tells the gripping story of the missing pioneers, placing their poignant history in the context of cultural discourse and imperial politics. Ranging across fiction, poetry, navigation, reception and tales of exploration, he expertly delves into one of the most contested questions in the annals of colonization.

Nordic Romanticism: Translation, Transmission, Transformation is an edited collection exploring the varied and complex interactions between national romanticisms in Britain, Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden. The collection considers both the reception and influence of Nordic romanticism in Britain and Germany and also the reciprocal impact of British and German romanticism in the Nordic countries. Taken as a whole, the volume suggests that to fully understand the range of these individual national romanticisms we need to see them not as isolated phenomena but rather as participating, via translation and other modes of reception, in a transnational or regional romanticism configured around the idea of a shared cultural inheritance in 'the North'.

Nordic Romanticism: Translation, Transmission, Transformation is an edited collection exploring the varied and complex interactions between national romanticisms in Britain, Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden.  The collection considers both the reception and influence of Nordic romanticism in Britain and Germany and also the reciprocal impact of British and German romanticism in the Nordic countries. Taken as a whole, the volume suggests that to fully understand the range of these individual national romanticisms we need to see them not as isolated phenomena but rather as participating, via translation and other modes of reception, in a transnational or regional romanticism configured around the idea of a shared cultural inheritance in ‘the North’.

In Roman religion, Terminus was an agrarian god who protected boundary markers. Stones were often used to provide an effective means for marking these boundaries, although a stump or a tree sometimes served to demarcate adjacent properties. The need to demarcate boundaries and define ends continues to shape our way of thinking at the most fundamental level. The articles in this book investigate, among other things, developments in literature, film, historiography, and new digital entertainment, to see how they reflect cultural anxieties about 'the end' and/or how they are determined by the need to mark boundaries. The contributions are organized so that they reflect thematic, national, and chronological perspectives. But, they also show that it is possible to identify several threads of continuity in the way that 'the end' has been conceptualized. By examining ideas of culmination, conclusion, closure, finale, and termination - from the perspective of a number of various genres, cultural formations, and historical contexts - these essays on 'terminus' show how endings are carriers of meaning in social and cultural contexts. (Series: Interdisciplinaere Kulturstudier / Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies - Vol. 5)

CONTENTS: Introduction: Movable Type, Mobile Nations; Pulp, The Armed Services Editions & GI Reading During WWII; Legions, Laws & Language: Book History & English Hegemony; Books, Swords, & Readers: The Albatross Press & the Third Reich; Social Networks: Modeling the Transnational Distribution & Production of Books; The Serial Revolution at the Periphery; Fiction & the Other Reader: The Reception of Imperial Adventure Romance in Africa; Indian Ocean Pages: Port Cities & Postcolonial Printing; The Scripts of Nationalism: Between the Lines of Premchand's "Kafan"; Book History & the Metonymies of the Text.