Extreme North: A Cultural History

by Bernd Brunner

Book Overview

People have perennially projected their fantasies onto the North as a frozen no-man's-land full of marauding Vikings or as the unspoiled landscape of a purer, more elemental form of life. Bernd Brunner recovers the encounters of adventurers with its dramatic vistas, fierce weather, exotic treasures, and indigenous peoples--and with the literary sagas that seemed to offer an alternate ("whiter" and "superior") cultural origin story to those of decadent Greece/Rome and the moralistic "Semitic" Bible. The Left has idealized Scandinavian social democracy. The Right borrows from a long history of crackpot theories of Northern origins. Nordic phenotypes characterized eugenics, which in turn influenced America's limits on immigration.

The North, Brunner argues, was as much invented as discovered. A valuable contribution to intellectual history, full of vivid documentation, Extreme North is an enlightening journey through a place that is real, but also, in fascinating and very disturbing ways, imaginary.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393881008
• ISBN13: 9780393881004
• Release Date: February 2022
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"