Viking Mediologies is a study of pre-modern multimedia rooted in the embodied poetic practice of Viking Age skalds. Prior study of the skaldic tradition has focused on authorship—distinctions of poetic style, historical contexts, and attention to the oeuvres of the skalds whose names are preserved in the written tradition. Kate Heslop reconsiders these not as texts but as pieces in a pre-modern media landscape, focusing on poetry’s medial capacity to embody memory, visuality, and sound. Mobile, hybrid, diasporic social formations—bands of raiders and traders, petty kingdoms, colonial expeditions—achieved new prominence in the Viking Age. Skalds offered the leaders of these groups something uniquely valuable. With their complicated poetry, they claimed to be able to capture shared contingent meanings and re-mediate them in named, memorable, reproducible works. The commemorative poetry in kviðuháttr remembers histories of ruin and loss. Skaldic ekphrasis discloses and reproduces the presence of the gods. Dróttkvætt encomium evokes for the leader’s retinue the soundscape of battle. As writing arrived in Scandinavia in the wake of Christianization, the media landscape shifted. In the poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, skalds adjusted to the demands of a literate audience, while the historical and poetological texts of the Icelandic High Middle Ages opened a dialogue between Latin Christian ideas of mediation and local traditions. In the Second Grammatical Treatise, for example, the literate technology of the grid is used to analyze the complex resonances of dróttkvætt as the output of a syllable-spewing hurdy-gurdy—a poetry machine. Offering both new readings of both canonical works such as Ynglingatal, Ragnarsdrápa, and Háttatal, and examinations of lesser-known texts like Glymdrápa, Líknarbraut, and Sturla Þórðarson’s Hákonarkviða, Viking Mediologies explores the powers and limits of poetic mediation.

Sagas of Icelanders, also called family sagas, are the best known of the many literary genres that flourished in medieval Iceland, most of them achieving written form during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Modern readers and critics often praise their apparently realistic descriptions of the lives, loves and feuds of settler families of the first century and a half of Iceland's commonwealth period (c. AD 970-1030), but this ascription of realism fails to account for one of the most important components of these sagas, the abundance of skaldic poetry, mostly in dróttkvætt "court metre", which comes to saga heroes' lips at moments of crisis. These presumed voices from the past and their integration into the narrative present of the written sagas are the subject of this book. It investigates what motivated Icelandic writers to develop this particular mode, and what particular literary effects they achieved by it. It also looks at the various paths saga writers took within the evolving prosimetrum (a mixed verse and prose form), and explores their likely reasons for using poetry in diverse ways. Consideration is also given to the evolution of the genre in the context of the growing popularity in Iceland of romantic and legendary sagas. A final chapter is devoted to understanding why a minority of sagas of Icelanders do not use poetry at all in their narratives.g prosimetrum (a mixed verse and prose form), and explores their likely reasons for using poetry in diverse ways. Consideration is also given to the evolution of the genre in the context of the growing popularity in Iceland of romantic and legendary sagas. A final chapter is devoted to understanding why a minority of sagas of Icelanders do not use poetry at all in their narratives.g prosimetrum (a mixed verse and prose form), and explores their likely reasons for using poetry in diverse ways. Consideration is also given to the evolution of the genre in the context of the growing popularity in Iceland of romantic and legendary sagas. A final chapter is devoted to understanding why a minority of sagas of Icelanders do not use poetry at all in their narratives.g prosimetrum (a mixed verse and prose form), and explores their likely reasons for using poetry in diverse ways. Consideration is also given to the evolution of the genre in the context of the growing popularity in Iceland of romantic and legendary sagas. A final chapter is devoted to understanding why a minority of sagas of Icelanders do not use poetry at all in their narratives.

"Transforming McLuhan explores the radical, humanist line of descent in interpreting Canadian media and culture theorist Marshall McLuhan's work, rejecting the dominant view of McLuhan as a conservative, uncritical herald of technological determinism and capitalism. This McLuhan is the oppositional critic of modernity, resisting uncontrolled technological change, who seeks new media forms with a human face. Contributors from diverse international and academic perspectives include Douglas Kellner, Nick Stevenson, Gary Genosko, Richard Cavell, Lance Strate, Glenn Willmott, Patrick Brantlinger, Donna Flayhan, and Bob Hanke." ""Marshall McLuhan was the first to theorize and to develop a concept of media, indicating their importance to all areas of society and culture. Today media are far more pervasive than in the 1950s and 1960s when he wrote. Yet his work has still not received its due attention. Transforming McLuhan will begin to correct this oversight."---Mark Poster, University of California-Irvine; Author of What's the Matter with the Internet? and Information Please" ""Transforming McLuhan re-reads the McLuhan phenomenon in light of today's media-saturated, 24/7 news and smartphone world. Here we meet again with the visionary Tiresias in the Underworld whose dark sayings once lit the late afternoon of the twentieth century. These critical readings create a time-out to question him again and to open space-time interstices for alternate thoughts and alternate actions." ---Michael Heim, Mount St. Mary's College, Los Angeles; Author of The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality and Virtual Realism" ""Transforming McLuhan offers a rich and textured reconsideration of Marshall McLuhan's ideas, demonstrating how McLuhan's work is a better match for current multi-dimensional and ambivalent understandings of media and culture than it was for the narrower conceptions that guided those who dismissed McLuhan in his own time. These provocative and well-written essays persuasively engage in what I have called morphing' McLuhan with other key theoretical frameworks. As a resuit, Transforming McLuhan illustrates that cultural theorists have much to learn from McLuhanism, but that McLuhan's perspective also has much room for enrichment t from critical media studies." ---Joshua Meyrowitz, University of New Hampshire; Author of No Sense of Place: The Impact of Media on Social Behavior"--BOOK JACKET.

In recent years, the field of Memory Studies has emerged as a key approach in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and has increasingly shown its ability to open new windows on Nordic Studies as well. The entries in this book document the work-to-date of this approach on the pre-modern Nordic world (mainly the Viking Age and the Middle Ages, but including as well both earlier and later periods). Given that Memory Studies is an ever expanding critical strategy, the approximately eighty contributors in this volume also discuss the potential for future research in this area. Topics covered range from texts to performance to visual and other aspects of material culture, all approached from within an interdisciplinary framework. International specialists, coming from such relevant fields as archaeology, mythology, history of religion, folklore, history, law, art, literature, philology, language, and mediality, offer assessments on the relevance of Memory Studies to their disciplines and show it at work in case studies. Finally, this handbook demonstrates the various levels of culture where memory had a critical impact in the pre-modern North and how deeply embedded the role of memory is in the material itself.

Counterterrorism consultant Marc Sageman examines the history and theory of political violence in his comprehensive new book. Seeking patterns across numerous key case studies, Turning to Political Violence offers a paradigm-shifting perspective that yields stark new implications for the ways liberal democracies should respond to terrorism.

The volume Gardens of Madeira – Gardens of the World. Contemporary Approaches displays present tendencies in calling upon the idea of gardens, being a wide-range approach to their literary, sociological and cultural representations. The book`s four parts: “Madeira: A Garden in the Sea?”, “Gardens as Temporal and Spatial Category. Cultural and Literary Approaches”, “Gardens as an Expression. Socio-cultural Perspectives” and “Re-Creating the Archetypal Garden – Discourses and Practices” refer to vast geographical and cultural areas, starting with the very complex sample of the overseas-yet-European Island of Madeira, and then joining the exemplification material from historical and contemporary European communities (with some luso-centric accents), including examples from the less known Slavonic and Eastern European countries. Those European issues are confronted with various non-European societies such as from Africa, Asia, and both Americas. Gardens evoke and express in many ways the present human condition, and - as such a process goes on - this book provides proposals for patterns to connect them to the modern and post-modern rules of self defining, reading the Other, interpreting world/national/cultural literatures, as well as to the various attempts to introduce the idea of gardens into the basic spatial and temporal aspects of contemporary communities. It also demonstrates the theoretical and practical attempts to project our “gardens` dependence” on to one of the essentials for contemporary societies which are multicultural, urbanised, technologically equipped and dependent, but which still are keen on reading and constructing paradises as environmental and cultural spaces for both asylum and encounter. The huge advantage of the book is showing to scholars and the wider public how discourses from the past meet with the quests of both the Humanities and the Sciences for gardening inspirations, not only for the sake of the today’s societies, but also when projecting the future of the Earth.

In Zero Comments, internationally renowned media theorist and 'net critic' Geert Lovink revitalizes worn out concepts about the Internet and interrogates the latest hype surrounding blogs and social network sites. In this third volume of his studies into critical Internet culture, following the influential Dark Fiber and My First Recession, Lovink develops a 'general theory of blogging.' He unpacks the ways that blogs exhibit a 'nihilist impulse' to empty out established meaning structures. Blogs, Lovink argues, are bringing about the decay of traditional broadcast media, and they are driven by an in-crowd dynamic in which social ranking is a primary concern. The lowest rung of the new Internet hierarchy are those blogs and sites that receive no user feedback or 'zero comments'. Zero Comments also explores other important changes to Internet culture, as well, including the silent globalization of the Net in which the West is no longer the main influence behind new media culture, as countries like India, China and Brazil expand their influence and looks forward to speculate on the Net impact of organized networks, free cooperation and distributed aesthetics.

Between the two world wars, a distinct and vibrant film culture emerged in Europe. Film festivals and schools were established; film theory and history was written that took cinema seriously as an art form; and critical writing that created the film canon flourished. This scene was decidedly transnational and creative, overcoming traditional boundaries between theory and practice, and between national and linguistic borders. This new European film culture established film as a valid form of social expression, as an art form, and as a political force to be reckoned with. By examining the extraordinarily rich and creative uses of cinema in the interwar period, we can examine the roots of film culture as we know it today.