Jes Battis is an associate professor of English at the University of Regina. His teaching and research focus on intersections between fantasy and sexuality as they occur across a number of historical periods, including the middle ages and the eighteenth century. He is also the author of the Occult Special Investigator series, with Ace Books. Susan Johnston is an associate professor of English at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, where her courses include George R.R. Martin, J.K. Rowling, and literary historiography and theory.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on Editions

Introduction: On Knowing Nothing (Susan Johnston and Jes Battis)

Language and Narration

The Languages of Ice and Fire (David J. Peterson)

"Sing for your little life": Story, Discourse and Character (Marc Napolitano)

What Maesters Knew: Narrating Knowing (Brian Cowlishaw)

Histories

"Just songs in the end": Historical Discourses in Shakespeare and Martin (Jessica Walker)

Dividing Lines: Frederick Jackson Turner's Western Frontier and George R.R. Martin's Northern Wall (Michail Zontos)

Philosophies

"All men must serve": Religion and Free Will from the Seven to the Faceless Men (Ryan Mitchell Wittingslow)

"Silk ribbons tied around a sword": Knighthood and the Chivalric Virtues in Westeros (Charles H. Hackney)

Bodies

Cursed Womb, Bulging Thighs and Bald Scalp: George R.R. Martin's Grotesque Queen (Karin Gresham)

"A thousand bloodstained hands": The Malleability of Flesh and Identity (Beth Kozinsky)

A Thousand Westerosi Plateaus: Wargs, Wolves and Ways of Being (T.A. Leederman)

Intimacies

Sex and the Citadel: Adapting Same Sex Desire from Martin's Westeros to HBO's Bedrooms (David C. Nel)

Beyond the Pale? Craster and the Pathological Reproduction of Houses in Westeros (D. Marcel DeCoste)

Adaptations

The Hand of the Artist: Fan Art in the Martinverse (Andrew Howe)

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies": Transmedia Textuality and the Flows of Adaptation (Zoë Shacklock)

About the Contributors

Index