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Alex Naylor’s “‘My Skin Has Turned to Porcelain, to Ivory, to Steel’: Feminist Fan Discourses, Game of Thrones, and the Problem of Sansa” explores debates on Tumblr over the sword-fighting, genderbending figure of Arya Stark and her princess-turned-stoic-survivalist sister, Sansa. Fan perspectives on Sansa, Naylor finds, take the form of intense appreciations of her, reflections on how her narrative refracts issues of young women’s victimization and survival, and “defenses” that confront her detractors and implicate the role of sexism and misogyny in some fans’ vocal dislike of the character. Because, for many young women, this kind of online popular culture critique is their first introduction to feminist ideas, argues Naylor, it is most productively explored within the context of a wider debate in both feminist and fandom social media spaces about what a modern feminist ethics of media consumption might look like.

This chapter explores how the acting in Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–present) both confirms and problematizes some common assumptions about British acting, and thus by extension notions of difference between British and American acting. The chapter anchors its analysis in the work by Conleth Hill (who plays Varys) and Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth). It considers the ways in which their performances challenge binary distinctions commonly found in discourses on British and American acting (e.g., technical strength versus organic “shooting from the hip,” suitability for stage-versus suitability for screen-based work). By highlighting the complexity and nuance in Hill’s and Cunningham’s acting, the chapter makes an intervention into discourses about British acting that is especially timely given the considerable success of British and Irish actors in contemporary US film and television. In doing so, it makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on performance and transatlantic television.

In the second of two chapters connecting the management of sexuality to the fortunes of Augustus, his dynasty, and the empire it governs, Prince explores how the dynamics shaping Rome also inform the characterization and narrative arc of Cersei Lannister in HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011-), another prestige cable series produced during the current golden age of television. She compares Cersei Lannister to Roman historiography’s portrayal of Agrippina the Younger: granddaughter of Augustus, sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero, yet born into a patriarchal system in which she could only wield power by controlling men around her. In this strategy, both Agrippina and Cersei are challenged by another aspirant to power and competitor for influence, with deadly results. Such ambition led to Tacitus labeling Agrippina a dux femina (“woman commander”), among other imperial women whose “masculine” hunger for power was blamed for the catastrophic decline of their dynasty and of Rome itself – much as the coming of winter on Game of Thrones is correlated with the moral depravity, and dynastic collapse, in which Cersei is intimately implicated. These pessimistic narratives of decline invoke the myth of the iron age, the inverse of the golden age.

‘Each person in Ulster’, Seamus Heaney famously remarked, ‘lives first in the Ulster of the actual present and then in one or other Ulster of the mind.’ While explicit reference to the Middle Ages may seem conspicuous by its absence in the litany of formative dates which pepper contemporary political and popular narrative in the North of Ireland – whether 1690 (the Battle of the Boyne), 1798 (the Rebellion of the United Irishmen), 1801 (the Act of Union), 1912 (the signing of the Ulster Covenant), 1916 (the Easter Rising) or 1998 (the signing of the Good Friday Agreement) – this essay argues, through examination of three case studies – of Cú Chulainn, the Hound of Ulster; the Red Hand; and St Patrick – that medievalism is at the very centre, both chronologically and conceptually, of the historicising reflexes of Irish politics.

The introduction begins by pointing to the common themes among the chapters in this part. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 explore the functions that the selected case study programs serve for specific broadcasting institutions (PBS, Sky, ITV, HBO, and the BBC) that choose to partner in one form or another with their transatlantic counterparts. These chapters also explore the themes of national identity, heritage and channel branding touched upon in the first part, highlighting their importance to the relationship of transatlantic partners and to specific programs’ placement within their import markets. Chapters 8 and 9 investigate the ways in which two programs, Episodes and Game of Thrones, textually encode some of the problematics of the transatlantic relationship—widespread assumptions about the differences between US/UK production contexts and acting styles. The rest of the introduction provides brief summaries of each chapter.

Ayelet Haimson Lushkov, in “Genre, Mimesis, and Virgilian Intertext in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire,” examines how the relationship between Martin’s Renly Baratheon and Loras Tyrell resonates with the Nisus and Euryalus episode in Virgil’s Aeneid. Lushkov takes seriously the presence of the classics in Martin’s Westeros, arguing that the Aeneid, as well as the Homeric resonances it carries along with it, helps us untangle some of the modern work’s bewildering mass of detail. Exploring the various ways in which the two erotic pairs double one another and switch roles, Lushkov identifies a complex network of images and connections that belong to—and so invite critique of—the greater epic tradition.

Jesse Weiner, in “Classical Epic and the Poetics of Modern Fantasy,” explores some of the theoretical consequences of the common idea that modern high fantasy is ‘epic in prose.’ This chapter is intended to be, not a specific case study, but rather a broader exploration of the generic links between high fantasy and heroic epic, seen in part through the lens of ancient Greek aesthetics. Detailing how A Song of Ice and Fire fits aesthetic guidelines developed in Aristotle’s Poetics, Weiner argues that modern high fantasy—for many readers, the very paradigm of the modern genre—shares not only many of the superficial tropes of ancient heroic epic but also, and perhaps more importantly, some of its deeper aesthetic values.