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.