Markku Lehtimaki – författare

Privileging the visual as the main method of communication and meaning-making, this book responds critically to the worldwide discussion about the Arctic and the North, addressing the interrelated issues of climate change, ethics and geopolitics. A multi-disciplinary, multi-modal exploration of the Arctic, it supplies an original conceptualization of the Arctic as a visual world encompassing an array of representations, imaginings, and constructions. By examining a broad range of visual forms, media and forms such as art, film, graphic novels, maps, media, and photography, the book advances current debates about visual culture. The book enriches contemporary theories of the visual taking the Arctic as a spatial entity and also as a mode of exploring contemporary and historical visual practices, including imaginary constructions of the North. Original contributions include case studies from all the countries along the Arctic shore, with Russian material occupying a large section due to the country’s impact on the region

Privileging the visual as the main method of communication and meaning-making, this book responds critically to the worldwide discussion about the Arctic and the North, addressing the interrelated issues of climate change, ethics and geopolitics. A multi-disciplinary, multi-modal exploration of the Arctic, it supplies an original conceptualization of the Arctic as a visual world encompassing an array of representations, imaginings, and constructions. By examining a broad range of visual forms, media and forms such as art, film, graphic novels, maps, media, and photography, the book advances current debates about visual culture. The book enriches contemporary theories of the visual taking the Arctic as a spatial entity and also as a mode of exploring contemporary and historical visual practices, including imaginary constructions of the North. Original contributions include case studies from all the countries along the Arctic shore, with Russian material occupying a large section due to the country’s impact on the region

The book explores environmental issues in twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction and how those issues are dealt with by specific literary means. It proposes a reciprocal relationship between nature and narrative—the idea according to which nature both informs and inspires artistic creations, while literary designs and rhetoric also shape our ideas and perceptions of the natural environment. It is argued that in order to address design and rhetoric in environmental texts, we need a close analysis of those world-shaping functions of literary narratives that unite ecocritical and narratological interests. The author presents readings of contemporary novels and their varying ways of seeing nature through narrative devices and fictional minds. The novels discussed in the book are Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Ian McGuire’s The North Water, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, Paul Harding’s Tinkers and Enon, J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, Ian McEwan’s Solar, and Jenny Offill’s Weather.

The book explores environmental issues in twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction and how those issues are dealt with by specific literary means. It proposes a reciprocal relationship between nature and narrative—the idea according to which nature both informs and inspires artistic creations, while literary designs and rhetoric also shape our ideas and perceptions of the natural environment. It is argued that in order to address design and rhetoric in environmental texts, we need a close analysis of those world-shaping functions of literary narratives that unite ecocritical and narratological interests. The author presents readings of contemporary novels and their varying ways of seeing nature through narrative devices and fictional minds. The novels discussed in the book are Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Ian McGuire’s The North Water, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, Paul Harding’s Tinkers and Enon, J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, Ian McEwan’s Solar, and Jenny Offill’s Weather.

This book addresses the Arctic and the northern regions by exploring cold waters and northern seascapes. It focuses on cultural discourses and artistic representations concerning the human experience and imagination of how the Arctic Ocean has been explored and used. It aims to assess what is specific to the northern waters vis-à-vis other sea and water areas in the world. The contextual background is provided by the fundamental shift from terra-based thinking towards aqua-based thinking, including the histories of the northern waters and the innovative ocean studies of the last decades.

This book will be of interest to readers in Arctic studies and Sea and Ocean studies (including those with interests in literature, history, cultural and film studies, anthropology and politics), Environmental History and Cultural studies as well as in Russian studies.The book has been assembled with a view towards upper-level undergraduate and post-graduate students and scholars and will also be appropriate for courses in the fields mentioned above. The book will be of interest to specialists working in and with Arctic environmental issues. There is a broad array of international academic networks, environmental, governance and cultural associations outside academia whose members may also find the book of interest.