Imagining the Arctic

Imagining the Arctic

Author: Huw Lewis-Jones

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-03-13

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 1786722461

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Imagining the Arctic explores the culture and politics of polar exploration and the making of its heroes. Leading explorers, the celebrity figures of their day, went to great lengths to convince their contemporaries of the merits of polar voyages. Much of exploration was in fact theatre: a series of performances to capture public attention and persuade governments to finance ambitious proposals. The achievements of explorers were promoted, celebrated, and manipulated, whilst explorers themselves became the subject of huge attention. Huw Lewis-Jones draws upon recovered texts and striking images, many reproduced for the first time since the nineteenth century, to show how exploration was projected through a series of spectacular visuals, helping us to reconstruct the ways that heroes and the wilderness were imagined. Elegantly written and richly illustrated, Imagining the Arctic offers original insights into our understanding of exploration and its pull on the public imagination.


Wonder and the Marvellous from Homer to the Hellenistic World

Wonder and the Marvellous from Homer to the Hellenistic World

Author: Jessica Lightfoot

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-09-16

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 1009007335

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Wonder and wonders constituted a central theme in ancient Greek culture. In this book, Jessica Lightfoot provides the first full-length examination of its significance from Homer to the Hellenistic period. She demonstrates that wonder was an important term of aesthetic response and occupied a central position in concepts of what philosophy and literature are and do. She also argues that it became a means of expressing the manner in which the realms of the human and the divine interrelate with one another; and that it was central to the articulation of the ways in which the relationships between self and other, near and far, and familiar and unfamiliar were conceived. The book provides a much-needed starting point for re-assessments of the impact of wonder as a literary critical and cultural concept both in antiquity and in later periods. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.