Scandinavian Literature

This open access collection offers a detailed mapping of recent Nordic literature and its different genres (fiction, poetry, and children's literature) through the perspective of spatiality. Concentrating on contemporary Nordic literature, the book presents a distinctive view on the spatial turn and widens the understanding of Nordic literature outside of canonized authors. Examining literatures by Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish authors, the chapters investigate a recurrent theme of social criticism and analyze this criticism against the welfare state and power hierarchies in spatial terms. The chapters explore various narrative worlds and spaces—from the urban to parks and forests, from textual spaces to spatial thematics, studying these spatial features in relation to the problems of late modernity.

The literature of Scandinavia is amazingly rich and varied, consisting of the works produced by the countries of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland, and stretching from the ancient Norse Sagas to the present day. While much of it is unknown outside of the region, some has gained worldwide popularity, including the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, the stories of Isak Dinesen, and the plays of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. While obviously including the area's most famous works, the Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Literature and Theater also provides information on lesser known authors and current trends, literary circles and journals, and historical background. This is accomplished through a list of acronyms, a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and several hundred cross-referenced dictionary entries, which together make this reference the most comprehensive and up to date work of its kind related to Scandinavian literature and theater available anywhere.

A History of Scandinavian Literature, 1870-1980 was first published in 1982. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.The decade of the 1870s marked a breakthrough in the literature of Denmark and Norway and, in the next decade, of Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. Until that time, these countries had to a large extent received literary and cultural impulses from abroad, but with the development of new realistic and naturalistic literary modes in the 1870s, they became a creative cultural area, one of the centers of world literature. Sven Rossel begins his literary history at this turning point. Instead of providing a complete survey, with its risks of superficiality, he focuses on a number of outstanding writers who are considered representative of literary periods, stylistic trends, or social groups. Among the authors whose work he considers are the Danish essayist Georg Brandes and novelist Isak Dinesen, Norwegians Henrik Ibsen, Knut Hamsun, and Ole E. Rølvaag, Swedes August Strindberg, Selma Lagerlöf, and Vilhelm Moberg, Minna Canth and Christer Kijlman of Finland, and the Icelandic novelist and poet, Halldór Kiljan Laxness. He does not, however, confine himself to authors well established in the non-Scandinavian world but gives attention also to talented writers who have—undeservedly—remained unrecognized even in their native lands. Rossel provides a social, cultural, and political context for his literary study and emphasizes the interrelationship among the five countries. In addition, he stresses reciprocal influences in world literature, devoting special attention to Anglo-American cross-currents. This book is for scholars, students, and general readers interested in the literary and cultural life of the Nordic countries or in comparative literature.

An examination of representations of human migration in three centuries of Northern European literature. Migration is a frequent topic of many debates nowadays, whether it concerns refugees from war-torn areas or the economic pros and cons of the mobility of multinational corporations and their employees. Yet such migration has always been a part of the human experience, and its dimensions—with its shifting nature, manifestations, and consequences—were often greater than we can imagine today. In this book, ten scholars from Czechia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Sweden focus on how migration has manifested itself in literature and culture through the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. Examining the theme of migration as it relates to questions of identity, both national and individual, the authors argue that migration almost always leads to a disturbance of identity and creates a potential for conflicts between individuals and larger groups. The book digs deep into such cases of disturbance, disruption, and hybridization of identity as they are represented in three centuries of literary works from the European North.

Nordic Literature: A Comparative History is a multi-volume comparative analysis of the literature of the Nordic region. Bringing together the literature of Finland, continental Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Sápmi), and the insular region (Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands), each volume of this three-volume project adopts a new frame through which one can recognize and analyze significant clusters of literary practice. This first volume, Spatial nodes, devotes its attention to the changing literary figurations of space by Nordic writers from medieval to contemporary times. Organized around the depiction of various "scapes" and spatial practices at home and abroad, this approach to Nordic literature stretches existing notions of temporally linear, nationally centered literary history and allows questions of internal regional similarities and differences to emerge more strongly. The productive historical contingency of the "North" as a literary space becomes clear in this close analysis of its literary texts and practices.

Nordic Literature of Decadence fills a gap on the map of world literature and participates in a thriving area of research by extending the investigation of broadly understood fin de siècle decadence to unexplored areas of Nordic literature, which remain practically unknown to Anglophone audiences. In the Nordic countries the new Parisian movements were seen as having caused a malicious invasion, a 'black flood' that was spreading over the North destroying the very foundations of Nordic national cultures. Nevertheless, the appeal of this controversial movement was irresistible to discontents and innovators, even in countries where the old moral, religious and nationalist atmosphere still retained its stranglehold and modern urban, industrial and social developments lagged behind that of the metropoles breeding this new literature and art. The Nordic countries developed their own distinctive manifestations of decadence favouring allegorical and allusive forms, local rural settings and depictions of primitive nature, coupling the philosophical underpinnings of fin-de-siècle decadence with ancient Nordic mythology and rising national movements. Nordic decadence thus became a distinctive and recognizable phenomenon, which travelled back to France and other European countries, influencing the ongoing debate on decadence as it was conducted on a global scale. Nordic Literature of Decadence discusses literature from five Nordic countries: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Estonia and offers additional and alternative perspectives to the cosmopolitan traffic and cultural exchanges of literary decadence that have been explored so far in the English language scholarship.

Examines the work of six women prose writers of the 1930s, placing them for the first time within the broader context of European and American literary modernism.

This is a multilingual collection of more than fifty essays in English, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish by a distinguished group of scholars investigating the idea of transitions. Some of the authors are concerned with periods of transition...

The literary field and canon in the Nordic countries are under constant negotiation and transformation, with various alternative literatures having evolved alongside the majority literatures of these nations in recent decades. These new phenomena, constructed around perspectives regarding language, ethnicity, sexuality, gender and social class, have been categorised as migration, minority and queer literatures. Rethinking National Literatures and the Literary Canon in Scandinavia highlights these literatures and their histories, roles and impacts on both the literary establishment and (post)modern societies in the Nordic region. It also discusses how the constructions of national literary canons today are challenged by the influence of various critical perspectives, including postcolonial theories, and queer, indigenous, ethnic literary and gender studies. On a broader level, the book showcases the position literature has in the building of national identities in Nordic nation-states, and, in the process, demonstrates that the plurality of perspectives in literary studies has the potential to question the fundamentals of the literary canon, canon formations, national self-understanding, and identity. The book is composed of nine articles authored by literary scholars in Finland, Sapmi, Sweden, and Denmark. It addresses issues such as methodological nationalism in literary scholarship, the uses of concepts such as transnational and immigrant literature, the ways in which traditional Sami features are employed in contemporary Sami poetry, postcolonial representations in Nordic literature, and the ways that political processes of Othering are made visible in contemporary literature's uses of traditional Scandinavian folklore. Read together, these articles provide an overview of some of the challenges and changes in Nordic literature today.