They were the bestsellers of their time; in the late medieval period, a number of shorter romances and tales, such as Floire et Blancheflor, Partonopeus de Blois, Valentine and Orson and many others, enjoyed striking popularity across different regions of Europe. This essay collection gathers together contributions from across Europe, to examine the complex processes by which medieval romances were adapted across European borders. By examining how the content, form and broader contextualisation of individual romances were altered by the transition from one region to another, the essays address the role translators, narrators, editors and compilers played in adapting the tales to different cultural and codicological settings. In this context, they discuss not only the shifting plotlines of the tales, but also the points at which the generic features of the texts shift in response to changing cultural codes. In doing so, they raise wider questions concerning the links between genre, manuscript form, cultural assimilation and the popularity of certain romance texts in different cultural communities.

This new Companion provides a broad and perceptive overview of the most important vernacular literary genre of the Middle Ages. Freshly commissioned, original chapters from seventeen leading scholars introduce students and general readers to the form's poetics, narrative voice and manuscript contexts, as well as its relationship to the Mediterranean world, race, gender and the emotions, among many other topics. Providing fresh perspectives on the first pan-European literary movement, essays range across a broad geographical area, including England, France, Italy, Germany and the Iberian Peninsula, as well as a varied linguistic spectrum, including Arabic, Hebrew and Yiddish. Exploring the celebration of chivalric ideals and courtly refinements, the volume excavates the tensions and traumas lying beneath decorous surface appearances. An introduction, bibliography of texts and translations as well as chapter-by-chapter reading lists complete this essential guide.

Translations of French romances into other vernaculars in the Middle Ages have sometimes been viewed as "less important" versions of prestigious sources, rather than in their place as part of a broader range of complex and wider European text traditions. This consideration of how French romance was translated, rewritten and interpreted in medieval Sweden focuses on the wider context. It examines four major texts which appear in both languages: Le Chevalier au lion and its Swedish translation Herr Ivan; Le Conte de Floire et Blancheflor and Flores och Blanzeflor; Valentin et Sansnom (the original French text has been lost, but the tale has survivedin the prose version Valentin et Orson) and the Swedish text Namnlös och Valentin; and Paris et Vienne and the fragmentary Swedish version Riddar Paris och jungfru Vienna. Each is analysed through the lens of different themes: female characters, children, animals and masculinity. The author argues that French romance made a major contribution to the Europeanisation of medieval culture, whilst also playing a key role in the formation of a national literature in Sweden.

What draws people to study abroad or volunteer in far-off communities? Often the answer is romance – the romance of landscapes, people, languages, the very sense of border-crossing – and longing for liberation, attraction to the unknown, yearning to make a difference. This volume explores the complicated and often fraught desires to study and volunteer abroad. In doing so, the book sheds light on how affect is managed by educators and mobilized by students and volunteers themselves, and how these structures of feeling relate to broader social and economic forces.

“Remarkable: a book about borders that makes the reader feel sumptuously free.” —Peter Pomerantsev In this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the “Red Riviera” on the Black Sea, she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling electrified fence whose barbs pointed inward toward the enemy: the citizens of the totalitarian regime. Kassabova discovers a place that has been shaped by successive forces of history: the Soviet and Ottoman empires, and, older still, myth and legend. Her exquisite portraits of fire walkers, smugglers, treasure hunters, botanists, and border guards populate the book. There are also the ragged men and women who have walked across Turkey from Syria and Iraq. But there seem to be nonhuman forces at work here too: This densely forested landscape is rich with curative springs and Thracian tombs, and the tug of the ancient world, of circular time and animism, is never far off. Border is a scintillating, immersive travel narrative that is also a shadow history of the Cold War, a sideways look at the migration crisis troubling Europe, and a deep, witchy descent into interior and exterior geographies.

The cultural borders of Europe are today more visible than ever, and with them comes a sense of uncertainty with respect to liberal democratic traditions: whether treated as abstractions or concrete realities, cultural divisions challenge concepts of legitimacy and political representation as well as the legal bases for citizenship. Thus, an understanding of such borders and their consequences is of utmost importance for promoting the evolution of democracy. Cultural Borders of Europe provides a wide-ranging exploration of these lines of demarcation in a variety of regions and historical eras, providing essential insights into the state of European intercultural relations today.

Winston Churchill famously described the political alliance between the US and UK as a 'special relationship', but throughout the cultural history of these two countries there have existed transatlantic 'special relationships' of another kind - affairs between British and American citizens who have fallen in love, with one another but often too with the idea(l) of that other place across the ocean. From romantic novelist Elinor Glyn in the 1920s to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle today, this collection examines some of the history, contemporary manifestations and enduring appeal of US-UK romance across popular culture. Looking at both historical and contemporary case-studies, drawn from across film, television, music, literature, news and politics, this is a timely intervention into the popular romantic discourse of US-UK relations, at a critical and transitional moment in the ongoing viability of the special relationship.