Books by William Ian Miller

A brilliant, sometimes unsettling look at how ancient codes of honor figure in the social discomforts of everyday life.

Miller culls sources as varied as soldiers' memoirs, heroic and romantic literature, and philosophical discussions to get to the heart of courage-and to expose its role in generating the central anxieties of masculinity and manhood.

Our notion of the self depends on it; cultural identities have frequent recourse to its boundary-policing powers; and love depends on overcoming it. Miller traverses literature, philosophy, history, political theory, and psychology to show how disgust animates our world.

This work seeks to delve beneath the chaos and brutality of the Norse world to discover a complex interplay of ordering and disordering impulses.