Nordic Literature

Nordic Literature PDF Author: Steven P. Sondrup
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027265054
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 765

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Book Description
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.

Contemporary Nordic Literature and Spatiality

Contemporary Nordic Literature and Spatiality PDF Author: Kristina Malmio
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030233537
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
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.

Nordic Literature of Decadence

Nordic Literature of Decadence PDF Author: Pirjo Lyytikäinen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429655428
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
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.

Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Literature and Theater

Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Literature and Theater PDF Author: Jan Sjåvik
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810865017
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
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 currents 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.

Discourse in Old Norse Literature

Discourse in Old Norse Literature PDF Author: Eric Shane Bryan
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845970
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
The vast and diverse corpus of Old Norse literature preserves the language spoken not only by the Vikings, kings, and heroes of medieval Scandinavia but also by outlaws, missionaries, and farmers. Scholars have long recognized that the wealth of verbal exchanges in Old Norse sagas presents the modern reader with the opportunity to speak face-to-face, as it were, with these great voices of the past. However, despite the importance of verbal exchanges in the sagas, there has been no book-length study of discourse in Old Norse literature since 1935. This book meets the need for such a study by offering a literary analysis based on the adjacent field of pragmatic linguistics, which recognizes that speakers often rely upon cultural, situational, and interpersonal context to communicate their meaning. The resulting, context-dependent meaning often deviates from the base semantic and syntactical components of an utterance: speakers hedge, imply, deflect to save face, or obscure meaning to damage an opponent's self-worth. Saga writers, this book argues, were masters of this type of indirectness in speech. It aims therefore to unlock the depth and subtlety of discourse in Old Norse literature and to leave readers with an understanding of how principles of pragmatics were employed throughout the sagas. A wide body of Old Norse materials is examined, including some of the best examples of Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders), such as Brennu-Njáls saga, Laxdoela saga, and Gísla saga Súrssonar, while also giving due attention to Konungasögur (kings' sagas), fornaldarsögur (legendary sagas), and other literature from the medieval North. ERIC SHANE BRYAN is Associate Professor of English at Missouri University of Science and Technology.

Emotion in Old Norse Literature

Emotion in Old Norse Literature PDF Author: Sif Ríkharðsdóttir
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843844702
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Draws on Old Norse literary heritage to explore questions of emotion as both a literary motif and as a social phenomenon.

A Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe

A Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe PDF Author: Olga Beloborodova
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027246580
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
Literary drafts are a constant in literatures of all ages and linguistic areas, and yet their role in writing processes in various traditions has seldom been the subject of systematic comparative scrutiny. In 38 chapters written by leading experts in many different fields, this book charts a comparative history of the literary draft in Europe and beyond. It is organised according to eight categories of comparison distributed over the volume’s two parts, devoted respectively to ‘Text’ (i.e. the textual aspects of creative processes) and ‘Beyond Text’ (i.e. aspects of creative processes that are not necessarily textual). Across geographical, temporal, linguistic, generic and media boundaries, to name but a few, this book uncovers idiosyncrasies and parallels in the surviving traces of human creativity while drawing the reader’s attention to the materiality of literary drafts and the ephemerality of the writing process they capture.

Women in Old Norse Literature

Women in Old Norse Literature PDF Author: J. Friðriksdóttir
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137118067
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Old Norse texts offer different ideas about what it is to be female, presenting women in diverse social and economic positions. This book analyzes female characters in medieval Icelandic saga literature, and demonstrates how they engaged with some of the most contested values of the period, revealing the anxieties of both the authors and audiences.

The Cambridge History of World Literature

The Cambridge History of World Literature PDF Author: Debjani Ganguly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009064452
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1171

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Book Description
World Literature is a vital part of twentieth-first century critical and comparative literary studies. As a field that engages seriously with function of literary studies in our global era, the study of World literature requires new approaches. The Cambridge History of World Literature is founded on the assumption that World Literature is not all literatures of the world nor a canonical set of globally successful literary works. It highlights scholarship on literary works that focus on the logics of circulation drawn from multiple literary cultures and technologies of the textual. While not rejecting the nation as a site of analysis, these volumes will offer insights into new cartographies – the hemispheric, the oceanic, the transregional, the archipelagic, the multilingual local – that better reflect the multi-scalar and spatially dispersed nature of literary production. It will interrogate existing historical, methodological and cartographic boundaries, and showcase humanistic and literary endeavors in the face of world scale environmental and humanitarian catastrophes.

Rethinking National Literatures and the Literary Canon in Scandinavia

Rethinking National Literatures and the Literary Canon in Scandinavia PDF Author: Dag Heede
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443885037
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
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, Sápmi, 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 Sámi features are employed in contemporary Sámi 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.