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.

Markku Lehtimäki, Ph.D., is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Turku, Finland. His fields of expertise are narrative theory, visual culture, ecocriticism, and American literature. Lehtimäki's recent studies focus on the relationship between nature and narrative, especially in the fiction about the changing north. His research projects include Natural Narratology, Cognitive Poetics, and Ecocriticism (2009-2011) and The Changing Environment of the North: Cultural Representations and Uses of Water (2017-2021), both funded by the Academy of Finland. He has co-edited several books, including Narrative, Interrupted: The Plotless, The Trivial and the Disturbing in Literature (De Gruyter, 2012) and Visual Representations of the Arctic: Imagining Shimmering Worlds in Culture, Literature and Politics (Routledge, 2021).

Arja Rosenholm, Ph.D., is professor (emerita) of Russian language and culture at Tampere University, Finland. Her fields of scholarship are Russian literature and culture, gender studies, and ecocriticism, including space studies. Her research projects include Water as Social and Cultural Space: Changing Values and Representations (2012-2016) and The Changing Environment of the North: Cultural Representations and Uses of Water (2017-2021), both funded by the Academy of Finland. She has co-edited several scholarly volumes, among them Meanings and Values of Water in Russian Culture (Routledge 2017), Water in Social Imagination: From Technological Optimism to Contemporary Environmentalism (Brill/Rodopi, 2017), and Visual Representations of the Arctic: Imagining Shimmering Worlds in Culture, Literature and Politics (Routledge, 2021).

Еlena Trubina, Ph.D., worked as a scholar on the framework of the project The Changing Environment of the North: Cultural Representations and Uses of Water, funded by the Academy of Finland. She is currently a lecturer at the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina, where she is also a fellow at the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies. Her research interests are post-socialist space, urban development, memory and cultural industries. Selected publications include "Sidewalk fix, elite maneuvering and improvement sensibilities: The urban improvement campaign in Moscow," Journal of transport geography, 83 (2020), and "Postcolonial Criticism and Urban Theory," in Russian, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 161 (2020).

Nina Tynkkynen, Ph.D., works as a professor in environmental governance and policy under the profiling area The Sea and is the head of subject in public administration in the Faculty of Social Sciences, Business and Economics at Åbo Akademi University. She received her Ph.D. in environmental policy in 2008 from the University of Tampere. Her research interests include environmental policy, politics and governance in multilevel governance settings, and the politics of environmental knowledge. Tynkkynen's research is featured in international and domestic high-impact social scientific journals. Selected publications include Russia and the politics of international environmental regimes: Environmental encounters or foreign policy? (a monograph by Edward Elgar in 2015; with A. Korppoo & G. Hønneland).