Nordic Literature: A Comparative History. Volume I: Spatial Nodes

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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 S�pmi), 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: A COMPARATIVE HISTORY VOLUME I: SPATIAL NODES Editorial page Title page LCC data Table of contents List of contributors List of figures Preface General project introduction Is there such a place as Scandinavia? Language and region Region as an explanatory space The framework The concept of place Place and literature Place and region Scapes and practices The aim of the framework Scapes Landscapes Fourteenth century and on: Looking back from landscape Mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth century: The emergence of landscape Nineteenth century: The dissemination of landscape Late nineteenth to early twentieth century: Inhabiting the landscape Twentieth century: Beneath, above, and beyond landscape Non-Nordic landscape Point of contact The domain of Bárður Snæfellsás Snæfellsjökull from afar Snæfellsjökull as medium A guide to Gurre, temporary landscape Utopias as territories of Swedish modernism Prelude: Two utopias in classic Scandinavian literature Urbs, the utopian global city of Ludvig Nordström The utopia of the planetary nomad of Harry Martinson The cosmic dystopia of Martinson The metachronic dystopia of Karin Boye Shipping: Heterotopias and the reterritorialization of modernism Jutland and the West Coast as liminal spaces in Danish literature Denmark’s imagined geography Blicher’s Jutland Hans Christian Andersen and the West Coast Goldschmidt: A Jewish writer’s Danish travels On the point The disillusion of the Danish Dream The postcolonial West Coast “Far higher mountains” Ascent On the hill: The self and the landscape On the mountaintop: The self and the sublime Poems of homesickness and longing Songs about the homeland and national anthems Descent South of the South Hans Christian Andersen in the Grotta Azzurra Fersen: Decadent Capri Munthe: Capri paradise Paradise lost Waterscapes Medieval mapping: Landnámabók þeiri Baroque topography: Nordlands trompet Going inland: Finnish lakes Archipelagos and islands At sea Modernist techniques: Östersjöar The tale of a thousand lakes Lakes and other literary waterscapes What one can do with lakes in literature Lakes as national symbols Erotic tensions on the lake Spiritual lakes Rewriting lake scenes The island in Nordic literature Archipelago Emilie Flygare-Carlén’s ‘Rosen på Tistelön’: Crime and punishment in the archipelago August Strindberg’s ‘I havsbandet’: The creative intellect and its defeat John Ajvide Lindqvist’s ‘Människohamn’: Loss, love, and faith Distance and threat: The city and the archipelago The archipelago as liminal space There must be a periphery Far away in the north: J. H. O. Djurhuus Dano-Faroese literature Paper boat in rough waters “Far out in an ocean” Gunnar Hoydal: A rooted cosmopolitan Conclusion The seven seas Sea histories Erasure and artistic archaeology Sea, ship, sailor Domestic life and maritime life Antagonism Compromise Re-enchantment Cityscapes The urban novel Cityscape as lightscape Cityscape as wordscape Beyond the Nordic cityscape Through the land of ‘lagom’ in literature “A charming and remarkable intermediate!” “A town under this town” “A kick that shattered the glass and broke the frame” “Though so like Paris…” “One of the most beautifully located small cities in Sweden” “What is a pane of glass in this world?” A city awakens The student novel The city walker Helsinki in the mist The Great Strike and the Viapori Rebellion A kaleidoscopic city novel Conclusion Walking the city The didactic traveler The journalist The revolutionary The spiritual wanderer The vagabond The bohemian The sexual woman The worker The ‘flâneur’ revisited The limits of the unlimited The history-accumulator The making of Berlin (1800–70) The modern metropolis: Berlin as a parvenu (1870/71–1914/18) Fascinating excesses, enchanting order (1914/18–1944) Cold wars (1945–89) Berlin as a ‘lieu de mémoire’ (1989/90–2010) Poets in New York City of sun and dreams Between anachronism and synchronism The howl from America City of the body Prose writers in New York Everything glitters Lightscapes Myth and meaning of foreign lightscapes in Nordic literatures 1 “Sun came from the South” Contrasting domestic lightscapes Four types of lightscapes Religion and metaphysics (1500–1870) The celestial lightscape reaches the Earth Rhetoric and poetic creativity (1600 to the present) Self-promoting lightscapes Lightscapes of cognition (1750–1925) Myth and meaning of foreign lightscapes in Nordic literatures 2 “I am longing for Italy” The new literary lightscape From the touristic gaze to the escapist illusion Individualized lightscapes Existential changes Escapist dreams Cosmologies The sea and the city Qualities of light Forest-light to field-light The presence of past light Shadow lands Glocalizing the light of Norwg-West Inner light The light of labor Regio Norwg-West, picts takat fra ofven Light Millenniumscapes New Nordic At the margins of the welfare state Beyond literary place Toxic places Place and the nation The atomic age and the vision of the global Chernobyl in the Nordic spatial imagination Toxicity and the lost pastoral Toxicity and a globalized sense of place Toxicity and invisible geographies Pollution and place This site is under construction Imagined communities and planned regions Negotiating national boundaries in the novel Bridging the binational binary The Øresund as global nexus Øresund noir: Bron/Broen The ephemerality of the region Epilogue Cathartic moments or spatial liberty Fiction Gameplay ‘Hamlet’ revisited Caterpillar and self-reference Playability: Closing remarks Introduction Settling “And the two shall become one flesh” Taking land and claiming place in Nordic migrant literature Emigration and immigration narratives Contemporary migrant literature Conclusion Radical utopianism among Nordic immigrant authors Dwelling Dwelling as captivity The rise of children’s literature Rural dwelling and the rise of tourism Seasonal secondary dwellings Acknowledgements “Worker ants on the lush bosom of Earth” Well-ordered households and daily routines Hard life and bohemian lifestyle in small cabins Separation from agrarian time-space Contemporary nostalgia for the agrarian way of life By land, by sea, by air, by mind “Tehkös liitto, lintuseni” / Let us strike a bargain, little bird “Flyttfåglarne” / Birds of passage Ruoktu Váimmus / Trekways of the Wind “Tid: en sång om Trojas murar” / Time: A song about the walls of Troy Conclusion Exploring Explorers of the Grand Tour The literary Arctic Portraying the journey to the pole Nansen’s Greenland expedition The polar avant garde Explorers as authors Hybrid genres Dislocation and identity formation in the work of Isak Dinesen Absorbing places and the triumph of modernity Northern bound Sacralizing Landscapes of power Sacralized space in Nordic oral literature The literary uses of liminal space The rise of nationalism Multiethnic challenges Postcolonial Challenges Niðaróss cathedral Nation and sacrifice Søren Kierkegaard’s ‘Frygt og Bæven’ Henrik Ibsen’s ‘Brand’ Dag Solstad’s ‘Armand V.’: Fotnoter til en uutgravd roman Kirsten Hammann’s ‘En dråbe i havet’ Legend and liminality Liminality Worlding Fishing for meaning on the Deatnu River De-framing the indigenous body Embracing “the mongrel” Landscape, memory, and culture Re-framing/De-framing the colonial representation “Arctic hysteria” Family albums Conclusion Acknowledgements Works cited Location index Person index