This chapter provides a chronological review of critical responses to Old Norse-Icelandic literature. The ‘book-prose vs free-prose’ debate is the starting-point for this overview, which then focuses on modern scholarship on sagas. The approach of the Icelandic school is discussed, followed by consideration of theoretical issues such as orality, structuralism, anthropological methods and the influence of non-Icelandic literary forms. Next come post-structuralism and narratology. The diversity of theoretical approaches which grew up towards the end of the twentieth century is documented, including post-colonialism and polysystem theory. Long-held generic distinctions are reviewed, and the development of gender studies with regard to Old Norse is described. Recent developments in the study of orality in prose and poetry are discussed, as are theoretical topics such as memory studies and the role of the paranormal. The chapter concludes with an account of the diversity of critical approaches to Old Norse-Icelandic literature and explains the need to employ integrated theories bringing in research from a number of disciplines, including archaeology, psychoanalysis and sociology.

This chapter reviews the ideas and reception of Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace. It focuses on a single, as yet untold, aspect: how Economic Consequences fits into the context of debates about the construction of the memory of the Great War. It asks: ‘What role did Keynes and The Economic Consequences of the Peace play in the formation of the “futility myth” which dominates British popular perception of the First World War to this day?’

The Introduction makes a case for reuniting memory studies and affect studies: like twins separated at birth, these two vibrant fields of in the study of Renaissance literature and culture have existed alongside each other, in spite of their conceptual entanglement, since antiquity. An overview of recent developments in contemporary theorizations of memory and affect is followed by an investigation of how they might be connected in the historical frameworks of early modern faculty psychology, Galenic humoralism, and, to use a modern term, distributed cognition.

This introductions sets out the key notions underlying a systematic analysis of Roman emperorship over six centuries. It focuses on the sources available for such an analysis and the pitfals in using them. Much attention is paid to the way Roman emperors were remembered, and how these expectations influenced the actions of later emperors.

The Introduction briefly surveys the individual importance of memory studies and death studies in the lives, literature, and visual imagination of Renaissance England and then makes a case for the benefit and utility of mapping out their specific areas of intersection. Although the cross-pollination between memory and mortality is not strictly reciprocal, the two thematic fields during the period overlap in a range of philosophical, educational, theological, and ceremonial domains so that studying one field requires scholars to investigate and understand the other.

This chapter examines how cause lawyers in conflicted and authoritarian contexts balance their professional responsibilities with their commitment to a political cause. It seeks to add to the existing literature on lawyers and social movements by offering a new comparative exploration of the relationship between cause lawyering and violent politically motivated movements and individuals. In particular, it considers how lawyers set the boundaries of their ‘professional project’ when managing relations with politically committed clients and collective movements. Using the notion of ‘legitimation work’, this chapter examines the complex, fluid, and contingent understandings of legal professionalism that are developed in such challenging contexts. To better understand the meaning of legal professionalism in such sites, it offers three overlapping ‘ideal types’ of cause lawyers: (a) struggle lawyers, (b) human rights activists, and (c) a ‘pragmatic moral community’. The chapter concludes by re‐examining the legitimating frameworks typically employed by each ideal type of lawyer.

Chapter 1 begins by comparing Gilbert Burnet’s focus on the song “Liliburlero” as the media event of the 1688 Revolution with what contemporary scholars have written about the importance of printed works at the time. It asserts the importance of adopting a multi-media perspective on the 1688 Revolution. It analyzes James II/VII’s shifting use of media in the context of challenges to his throne by the Duke of Monmouth and the Earl of Argyll in 1685 and William of Orange in 1688. It assesses William’s Declaration outlining “the Reasons Inducing him, to Appear in Armes in the Kingdome of England” and suggests that the document gained its authority as a printed text by being represented in oral and manuscript forms. It concludes by suggesting that the initial mediation of the 1688 Revolution impacted its later re-inscription as a site of “Glorious” cultural memory when William’s Declaration was reprinted in early eighteenth-century histories of recent events such as those by Edmund Bohun and Abel Boyer.

The editors’ Introduction provides an overview of and rationale for the volume as a whole. It highlights the book’s key contributions and conceptual frameworks, in part by offering two brief case studies – or “snapshots” – of the dynamic interplay of music and memory in different times, places, and media: Etruscan tomb painting and Athenian comedy.

The introduction outlines the key objectives of the book. It argues that there are different strands in the transitional justice literature that largely miss each other. On the one hand, there is a rich body of literature on memorialization processes and the role of memory and heritage in transition. This body of knowledge does not engage with the law, due to a perception that the law’s main focus is on accountability and prosecutions. On the other hand, the bulk of legal literature on transitional justice indeed tends to focus on accountability, neglecting its role in promoting reparations and guarantees of non-repetition, which are central to the success of transitional justice efforts. The chapter shows that, as a result of these two bodies not engaging one another, the law around culture, and cultural heritage in particular, is left at the mercy of other political forces in the transitional process, forces which tend to align with the pre-transition status quo, and therefore cultural heritage law unwittingly becomes a point of resistance to transitional efforts.

Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770) and George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706) embody the textual and ideological persistence of the Irish eighteenth century in our present. These texts inhabit contemporary culture as object of memory and as model of modernity. Eavan Boland’s poetry memorialises the eighteenth as Ireland’s ‘darkest century’, re-reading The Deserted Village as a front for a hostile colonial and capitalist modernity which took accelerated and influential shape in the Irish eighteenth century. Similarly, Farquhar’s play served throughout the eighteenth century to consolidate and extend the British fiscal-military state, an ideological function highlighted in Bertolt Brecht’s adaptation Trumpets and Drums (1955). The chapter focuses on two subsequent re-imaginings, Thomas Keneally’s 1987 novel The Playmaker and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s stage adaptation Our Country’s Good (1988). Both texts use metaphors of performance and rehearsal to illuminate the play’s function in propagating a political modernity grounded in the transitory and transitional cultures of eighteenth-century Ireland.