With striking consistency Morris’s 1877 epic Sigurd meets the principal criteria of its genre. The poem makes its story the vehicle for conveying culturally definitive lore and values, and imbues its heroic actors with the aim of earning a place in that story. The first paginal opening of the 1898 Kelmscott edition embodies this consistency, in imagery and typography that constitute a bibliographical and prosodic rite of passage inducting the reader into a balance of fullness with order that typifies the whole. This aesthetic-ethical balance is then repeatedly thematized along the poem’s synchronic and diachronic axes: e.g., on one hand panoramic vistas, on the other hand sweeping narrative renditions of cosmology and prophecy; or the pivotal “house” figure, which doubles as doomed architectural structure and as tragically concatenated lineage. Morris’s epic moreover incorporates, among other constituent modes like pastoral and romance, the newly ascendant Victorian genre of domestic fiction, which, after dominating the story with the novel-like marital intrigue and foregrounded subjectivity of book 3, yields across the final book to the epic obsequies of Sigurd and Brynhild and the final conflagration of the royal palace at Gudrun’s implacably vindictive hand.

In Chapter 5, on Yeats’s series of plays about the legendary warrior Cuchulain, I return to the early period to take up a thread of Yeats’s development as a dramatist in order to illustrate a crucial aspect of his worldmaking project. The legendary world that he envisioned in this series evolved out of his need to overcome the intransmissibility of indigenous Irish culture in anything like an original or authentic form, a problem that Yeats confronted when he considered the role of folklore and legend in a national literature. The plays are also well suited, by virtue of the temporal extension of the series – from the first production of On Baile’s Strand (1904) to the composition of The Death of Cuchulain (1939) – to convey Yeats’s developing sense of personality and the ethics of heroism. By transposing the heroic world of Cuchulain, particularly as described by Standish O’Grady and Augusta Gregory, to the contemporary stage, Yeats does not revive the past in the interests of preserving it in amber. His task, like that of the literary revival at large, was not just to express the vitality of the past and its ethos but to place both at the forefront of a modern national literary movement.

Since the 1920s, American writers have evinced a fascination with and investment in fictional representations of jazz music and jazz musicians. As this essay demonstrates, part of jazz’s appeal for fiction writers is that it offers the opportunity to explore various kinds of border crossing. This essay surveys several jazz fictions to explicate how these fictions portray jazz as a local event, often focusing on musicians who may not be known beyond their own communities, but who live to play the music. Using Nathaniel Mackey’s concept of artistic othering, this essay investigates how writers portray the jazz musician’s search for a space to belong, where artistic forms of risk-taking are affirmed and the contingencies jazz musicians face, whether it be in the form of substance abuse, underemployment, self-doubt, or social injustice can be managed through instances where self-repair, improvisation, and community constitute the foundations of the musician’s lifeworld. Jazz fiction, in other words, is deeply concerned with the contradictions of American life and how playing jazz music involves the act of containing contradictions.

This chapter describes the emergence of a new kind of sacrificial military hero, rooted in Christian rather than classical precedents. This development appears in the context of wars involving supposedly savage peoples--the Scottish Highlanders encountered in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and the indigenous peoples encountered as allies and enemies in North America and Canada. The figure of the devout Colonel Gardiner, killed at the Battle of Prestonpans, and looted by Highlanders, is compared with the brutal figure of the Duke of Cumberland (the victorious hero and butcher of Culloden). And responses to the death of General Braddock, killed in an ambush in the American wilds, and believed to have been left unburied, are compared with responses to the death of General James Wolfe, who died victorious at the Battle of Quebec (and who was sometimes represented as a Christian martyr). The hero-as-martyr was used to justify violence as part of a civilizing and Christianizing project.

This chapter argues that the first two cantos of Childe Harold and the Turkish Tales can be read as a sustained critique and questioning of a teleological history, or a history impelled by the acts of great men and heroes. It suggests that these poems engage with the intellectual crisis precipitated by the Napoleonic wars and a devastated Europe in different ways, representing a broad alienation from the meaningful progress of history both within and beyond European borders. Understanding Byron’s distinctive romanticism as primarily political rather than ontological, the chapter reads this group of poems as being charged with a late-enlightenment scepticism representative of a new freedom of thought in which there are no structural possibilities for history, and through which heroic acts are rendered ever more remote from civilisation’s improvement.

The framework and historical overview of my opening two chapters allow me to attend in Chapter 3 to the variety of epic productions in the 1790s. Surveying these epics, the chapter underlines the ways that they promote different ideas of British identity as they support, critique, and oppose the budding ideologies of Christian nationalism and imperialism. The chapter considers conservative epics that serve practically as propaganda for Tory politics and nascent imperialist sentiment (such as Henry James Pye’s Alfred), progressive epics that challenge both epic tradition and reactionary politics while still acquiescing to some assumptions of imperialist discourse, and religious epics that envision an empire of Christ whose relationship with the temporal British empire is often uncertain. Overall, the chapter suggests that the epic productions of the 1790s often imagined conversion as a partner of empire even as they revealed and frequently attempted to conceal the inconsistencies between them.

The chapter offers an analysis of an understudied episode in British and American popular fiction. Inspired by Greenland’s vanished settlers, a number of tales imagine isolation as a means to preserve the virtues and primordial purity of a white, ancestral past. These ‘lost colony’ stories are examined as partly compensatory fantasies that would offset contemporary concerns about cultural and racial decay for a culture under stress. They are narratives about communities – modelled on the idea of a lost European colony – that have been shielded from the corruption visited upon the Western world. Thus, the stories are often concerned with ethnic purity and eugenics. The last part of the chapter unravels the early twentieth-century press sensation that disrupted fantasies of ring-fenced whiteness in the Arctic. This was the discovery of the so-called Blond Eskimos in Victoria Island, who were purportedly the result of the old Greenland colonists having intermixed with the Indigenous population. The chapter concludes with an examination of how this new imagining of the fate of Greenland’s vanished settlers also impacted the writing of adventure tales for the popular market.

5. This chapter focuses on Foes ending, a book designed to confront with the limits of the novel form. It explores in new detail the evolution of this work from Coetzees drafts.

No era of polar history has received more attention than the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration. Its three most famous explorers – Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, and Ernest Shackleton – have been the subjects not only of academic research, but also of novels, plays, films, television programmes, and exhibitions at major museums. Rather than retelling in detail a familiar story, this chapter will trace how the history of the Heroic Age has evolved over the past century or so. Its core argument is that the very features which made it so compelling in the first decades of the twentieth century have made its place in recent European and American culture more problematic. It will conclude by suggesting a new way of thinking about the Heroic Age.

In this passage from Beryl Bainbridge’s 1991 novel The Birthday Boys, Robert Falcon Scott, leader of the Terra Nova Antarctic expedition, recalls the reflections of his fellow explorer and friend, the naturalist and physician Edward ‘Bill’ Wilson. The conversation occurs while the men are together in a tent during a depot-laying expedition in March 1911. Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates and Apsley Cherry-Garrard listen in on the exchange, which is broken by the entrance of Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers. Readers of Bainbridge’s novel, well aware of the fate of the historical Scott and his polar party, including Wilson, Oates, and Bowers, would recognize multiple ironies in this scenario.

This book revives a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory when Romantic-period writers exploit the growing awareness of irresolutions in Kant’s third Kritik, especially in his critique of judgements of the sublime. Read with hindsight, these openings can be seen to have generated literary opportunities for writings that explicitly embraced the philosophical significance delegated to the aesthetic by Kant, but then took advantage of the licence he had conceded. Romantic writing claimed a wider significance of its own that philosophy now had to learn to rationalise. Consequent aesthetic reorientations, in which splendours and miseries become interchangeable, reflect political instabilities already exploited by feminist and nationalist writing. Falling becomes a kind of rising, and literature’s unregulated power of metamorphosis persuasively challenges hierarchies of all kinds, including its own.

The concluding chapter draws out the broader implications of the research for our understanding of the present-day Arctic and offers new insights into the dominating ‘man-versus-nature’ trope that has become a standard mode of viewing the Arctic. Even expedition leaders and authors of narratives noted the trend in nineteenth-century media for magnifying the dangers of Arctic travel. The appropriation of the story of Franklin, and the search parties that followed, into popular culture has evolved from the first-hand records of expedition members who went to the Arctic. Yet these records were transformed into commodities before they reached the public eye, often concealing an Arctic that was local, intimate, and familiar. This local Arctic was fertile ground for the production of culture, with expedition members from all ranks partaking in representation. Moreover, the Arctic was exploited for humorous ends, with expedition members mining the incongruous nature of their situation. The narratives, prints, and panoramas that reached the metropolitan audience, however, displayed an icy, threatening world, a scene that still reverberates in the popular imagination today.

Another one of brecht's masterpieces, the galileo explores the fall of one scientist and the ongoing rise of science.

Based on a naturalist play, this collaborative adaptation showcases brecht's originality, not least through the framing action and the internal audience. Which brecht created.

This chapter analyzes traditions of staging the plays from the beginning of the twentieth century, spanning a period from the Boer Wars until the postcolonial wars of the present. It considers not only ways of depicting fighting and battles, but also perspectives on the morality of war created by Shakespeare and his directors. During this period, post-Victorian pictorial realism and historical “accuracy” survived in cinema, but in the theater they gave way to non-illusionistic and unlocalized sets as companies turned their attention from “history” to politics. This did not mean that spectacle diminished: shocking savagery and violence could be graphically represented, but pageants of royal and aristocratic grandeur along with appeals to patriotism sustained by providence were set against vignettes of common life – no longer “comic relief” but ironic touchstones that detected processes of chauvinism, huffing rhetoric, and heroic posturing as families, factions, and nations tore themselves apart.

The First World War led to the largest boom in published American war books since the Civil War. War memoirs were popular with both publishers and readers alike. Hundreds of returning doughboys took to their pens and published accounts of fighting in France. Joining them were books by nurses and canteen workers who also told stories of their experiences at the front supporting the Allied war effort. This chapter examines war memoirs published both during and after the war. It considers trends in martial publishing and argues that the wealth of war-relating writing created a cultural footprint of American war books that rested somewhat uneasily as feelings about the First World War changed in the 1920s. Moreover, the variety of war memoirs released further complicates notions of a uniform American experience in print. Rather, there is tension between books celebrating American and Allied victory with those that emphasize the hard-fought realities of combat on the western front.

This chapter argues that, during the First World War, personal, partial, emotive and literary practices were fundamental to how transatlantic discourses about the war were managed, maintained, and ultimately resolved in favor of the Anglo-American alliance. It examines the different ways writers - for example, Rupert Brooke, John Masefield, Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Robert Frost - were mobilized by institutions like Wellington House, universities, newspapers and publishers. It considers writers’ and poets’ contributions to overlapping official and unofficial propaganda networks, and how this cultural exchange worked to “sell” particular interpretations and experiences of the conflict to reading publics.

This chapter focuses on the reception of Richard Strauss’s music in the context of contemporary culture and influential ideas that circulated during his lifetime. It reveals how reception changed during these years, which spanned the monarchy, the democracy of the Weimar Republic, and the national socialist dictatorship. Around 1900, music journalism played an increasing role for music reception. Study of the music critics who reviewed premieres of Strauss’s operas and orchestra compositions illuminates key elements through which his music was understood and judged. Topics of discussion include orchestral virtuosity, the question of progress, new psychological ideas, the artistic presentation of history, heroism, and irony and satire in art, literature, and theater. The chapter further explores how Strauss's portrayal of himself in some works became a controversial issue.

Men’s adventure magazines faded in popularity by the opening of the 1970s, the same time as the American war in Vietnam was drawing to its conclusion. Popular media stories of returning veterans hardly lived up to the ideals portrayed in the magazines. Unlike World War II, the war in Vietnam could not be looked back upon nostalgically. Boys had come back not as victorious heroes but as men broken by war. While this storyline was equally fraught with imprecision, it nonetheless challenged the dominant narratives of adventure magazines. Thus, we should ask why a society desires to remember war and male veterans in certain ways. Many veterans’ memoirs, in fact, reflected key aspects of the prevailing narratives within adventure magazines, even as they contested the idea that war was ennobling. How we talk about wartime expectations on heroism, violence, and sex matters. Men’s magazines contributed to a normalization process of sorts, helping tropes about masculinity and gender become embedded into the larger popular culture of the Cold War era. And in times of war – and, arguably, peace as well – this is can be dangerous. War erodes the veneer of civilization that makes behaviors in fantasyland seem more possible and, thus, acceptable.