This book argues that adaptation is an underrecognized yet constitutive element of Nordic noir. In so doing, it reframes the prevailing critical view. Now celebrated for its global sweep, Nordic noir is equally a transmedial phenomenon. Nordic Noir, Adaptation, Appropriation deploys the tools of current adaptation studies to undertake a wide-ranging transcultural, intermedial exploration, adding an important new layer to the rich scholarship that has arisen around Nordic noir in recent years.
With its focus on the popular television genre of Nordic noir, this book examines subtle and explicit manifestations of geopolitics in crime series from Scandinavia and Finland, as well as the impact of such programmes on how northern Europe is viewed around the world. Drawing on a diverse set of literature, from screen studies to critical International Relations, Geopolitics, Northern Europe, and Nordic Noir addresses the fraught geopolitical content of Nordic television series, as well as how Nordic noir as a genre travels the globe. With empirical chapters focusing on the interlinked concepts of the body, the border, and the nation-state, this book interrogates the various ways in which northern European states grapple with challenges wrought by globalisation, neoliberalism, and climate change. Reflecting the current global fascination with all things Nordic, this text examines the light and dark sides of the region as seen through the television screen, demonstrating that series such as Occupied, Trapped, and The Bridge have much to teach us about world politics. This book will be of interest to those interested in geopolitics, national identity, and the politics of popular culture in: Scandinavian studies, media/screen studies, IR/political science, human/cultural geography, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and communication.
The terms ‘Nordic’ and ‘Scandinavian’ are widely used to refer to the politics, society and culture of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. But why have people felt the need to frame things as Nordic and why has the adjective Nordic become so prominent? This book adopts a rhetorical approach, analysing the speech acts which have shaped the meanings of the term. What do the different terms Nordic and Scandinavian have in common, and how have the uses of these terms changed in different historical periods? What accounts for the apparent upsurge in uses of the rhetoric of Nordicness in the 2010s? Drawing on eight case studies of the uses of Nordic and Scandinavian from the nineteenth century to the present day, the book explores the appeal and the flexibility of the rhetoric of Nordicness, in relation to race, openness, gender equality, food, crime fiction, Nordic co-operation and the Nordic model. Arguing that ‘Nordic’ and ‘Scandinavian’ are flexible and contested concepts that have been used in different, often contradictory and inherently political ways, the book suggests that the usage of the term has evolved from a means of creating a cultural community, to forging political co-operation and further to marketing models in politics and popular culture. The rhetorical approach also shows how many of the hallmarks of Nordic political culture, such as the Nordic model, Nordic gender equality or Nordic openness are more recent conceptualisations than usually assumed. As such, the book argues for the need to turn attention away from analysing the different components of Nordicness into studying how, when, and for what purpose different features were made Nordic.
This interdisciplinary collection explores the diverse relationships between the frequently ignored and inherently ambiguous hinterlands and their manifestations in literature and culture. Moving away from perspectives that emphasize the marginality of hinterlands and present them as devoid of agency and “cultural currency”, this collection assembles a series of original essays using various modes of engagement to reconceptualize hinterlands and highlight their semiotic complexity. Apart from providing a reassessment of hinterlands in terms of their geocultural significance, this book also explores hinterlands through such concepts as nostalgia, heterotopia, identity formation, habitation, and cognitive mapping, with reference to a wide geographical field. Literary and filmic revisions of familiar hinterlands, such as the Australian outback, Alberta prairie, and Arizona desert, are juxtaposed in this volume with representations of such little-known European hinterlands as Lower Silesia and Ukraine, and the complicated political dimension of First World War internment camps is investigated with regard to Kapuskasing (Ontario). Rural China and the Sussex Downs are examined here as writers’ retreats. Inner-city hinterlands in Haiti, India, Morocco, and urban New Jersey take on new meaning when contrasted with the vast hinterlands of megacities like Johannesburg and Los Angeles. The spectrum of diverse approaches to hinterlands helps to reinforce their multilayered and multivocal nature as spaces that defy clear categorization.
This book is a comprehensive study of Nordic Noir television drama from the 1990’s until today. The authors introduce the history of contemporary Nordic Noir from the perspective of place, production and location studies. The chapters include readings of well-known television crime dramas such as Beck, The Killing, Trapped and The Bridge as well as a range of other important Nordic Noir cases. The authors position the development of Nordic Noir in the global market for popular television drama and place the international attention towards Nordic crime dramas within regional development of drama production in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland. Consequently, Nordic Noir is read as both a transnational financial and creative phenomenon and as a local possibility for community building. Offering a comprehensible, scholarly and methodologically original approach to the popularity of Nordic television crime dramas, this volume is aimed at readers with an interest in crime drama as well as scholars and students of television drama.
Rather than being limited to political or legal discussion (like most books on Brexit), this book explores the relationship between cultural production and Brexit (both in the lead up to it; and in its aftermath). It is the first major study to take a comparative approach to analysing the relationship between cultural production and Brexit in all 4 nations of the UK. This comparative approach is necessary to get a detailed picture of the complex dynamics at work across each. This book is highly interdisciplinary in nature, looking at the rise of the cultural industries; the relationship between the UK City of Culture festival and its fore-runner, the European Capital of Culture; national book prizes in Britain and Europe; British variations on Nordic Noir TV; and the Brexit novel. As a result, it draws on research in the disciplines of geography, economics, film and television studies, history and politics as well as publishing and literary studies.
This book is a comprehensive study of peripheral locations in contemporary European TV crime series. Ambitiously, it covers the complete geography of Europe, and offers a nuanced image of a changing, dynamic, and unfinished continent. The chapters include analyses of the practical, creative approach to producing crime series in European peripheries and rural areas, evaluating a continent marked by an internal crisis between urban and rural Europe. The study includes readings of crime series such as Shetland, Bitter Daisies, Trom, Pagan Peak, and The Border, but presents such representative cases within broader tendencies on the European TV market, including challenges from streaming services, the influence of Nordic Noir, and changes within the cognitive geography of Europe. The authors position peripheral European crime series in a complex relationship between universal appeal and local recognisability and offer a comprehensive theoretical approach to the aesthetics of peripherality. Grounded in desktop production studies, the book presents an original scholarly approach to analysing European crime series from a continental point of view. Despite local differences, the spatio-generic orientations scrutinized in the book – Nordic Noir, Mediterranean Noir, Country Noir, Eastern Noir, and Brit Noir – show remarkable aesthetic similarities in series from territories otherwise normally unconnected in television production. Consequently, television crime series reveal a common tongue and voice for dialogue on a continent in a deepening crisis.
The Routledge Companion to Adaptation offers a broad range of scholarship from this growing, interdisciplinary field. With a basis in source-oriented studies, such as novel-to-stage and stage-to-film adaptations, this volume also seeks to highlight the new and innovative aspects of adaptation studies, ranging from theatre and dance to radio, television and new media. It is divided into five sections: Mapping, which presents a variety of perspectives on the scope and development of adaptation studies; Historiography, which investigates the ways in which adaptation engages with – and disrupts – history; Identity, which considers texts and practices in adaptation as sites of multiple and fluid identity formations; Reception, which examines the role played by an audience, considering the unpredictable relationships between adaptations and those who experience them; Technology, which focuses on the effects of ongoing technological advances and shifts on specific adaptations, and on the wider field of adaptation. An emphasis on adaptation-as-practice establishes methods of investigation that move beyond a purely comparative case study model. The Routledge Companion to Adaptation celebrates the complexity and diversity of adaptation studies, mapping the field across genres and disciplines.
Audiences for contemporary German film and television are becoming increasingly transnational, and depictions of German cultural history are moving beyond the typical post-war focus on German’s problematic past. Entertaining German Culture explores this radical shift, building on recent research into transnational culture to argue that a new process of internal and external cultural reabsorption is taking place through areas of mutually assimilating cultural exchange such as streaming services, an increasingly international film market, and the import and export of Anglo-American media formats.
Audiences for contemporary German film and television are becoming increasingly transnational, and depictions of German cultural history are moving beyond the typical post-war focus on Germany’s problematic past. Entertaining German Culture explores this radical shift, building on recent research into transnational culture to argue that a new process of internal and external cultural reabsorption is taking place through areas of mutually assimilating cultural exchange such as streaming services, an increasingly international film market, and the import and export of Anglo-American media formats.
