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The Faces of Swedish Modernity: Social Realism, Decadence, Modernism, Postmodernism
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The Faces of Swedish Modernity: Social Realism, Decadence, Modernism, Postmodernism

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787). This special issue belongs to the section "Literature in the Humanities".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 October 2022) | Viewed by 12105

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Susan Brantly

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA
Interests: decadence; modern breakthrough; modernism; postmodernism; literary history; historical fiction; Swedish literature; Isak Dinesen; Laura Marholm

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

That modernity should possess multiple faces is a useful metaphor put forward by Matei Calinescu. Over the years, faces change, as does our understanding of various literary movements. Moreover, the variety of faces may change depending on where one is, so it is possible that different countries will have different perspectives on modernity and the responses it provokes. This Special Issue argues that in the case of Sweden, the faces of modernity include social realism, decadence, modernism, and postmodernism. This claim is not undisputed. Seldom is social realism included as a facet of modernity in studies oriented towards the Western world, but in Scandinavia and Sweden in particular, the Nordic Modern Breakthrough of the late 19th Century has left a strong legacy of socially engaged literature that continues into the present. Moreover, postmodernism is viewed with distrust in some Swedish critical circles, primarily because of its perceived lack of social engagement. This volume is intended to explore these terms, their relationship to each other and the Swedish context, as well as their individual manifestations. 

Prof. Susan Brantly
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • Decadence
  • Modern Breakthrough
  • Modernism
  • Postmodernism
  • Realism
  • Literary History
  • Sweden
  • Scandinavia
  • Nordic

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Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

10 pages, 286 KiB  
Article
Medusa’s Gaze and Geijerstam’s Gay Science in the Swedish fin de siècle
by Gustaf Marcus
Humanities 2022, 11(6), 147; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11060147 - 25 Nov 2022
Viewed by 1642
Abstract
Gustaf af Geijerstam’s Medusas hufvud (Medusa’s Head, 1895) is one of the “account-settling novels” of the late nineteenth century. These novels reflect on the aesthetic reorientation after the breakdown of the “Eighties movement” in Sweden. One important dimension of this transformation was the [...] Read more.
Gustaf af Geijerstam’s Medusas hufvud (Medusa’s Head, 1895) is one of the “account-settling novels” of the late nineteenth century. These novels reflect on the aesthetic reorientation after the breakdown of the “Eighties movement” in Sweden. One important dimension of this transformation was the growing emphasis on gendered visions of authorship. I argue that Geijerstam’s novel is an attempt to create a male author role and a male intellectual sphere. The establishment of a male literary sphere requires homosocial desire, an artistic passion that Geijerstam understands as similar and different from sexual desire. This terminology is employed, after Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, to insist on a productive continuum between the repositioning on the literary field that the novel represents and the thinly disguised homosexual tensions between its three male characters. However, the homosexual tensions are also related to secrecy, disgust, and terror (most clearly visible in the important Medusa motif). I finally argue that Geijerstam employs the erotic triangle, where the woman functions as a “mediator” for a relationship between the men, as a plot device that lets him simultaneously explore and dissimulate this homosocial desire. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Faces of Swedish Modernity: Social Realism, Decadence, Modernism, Postmodernism)
10 pages, 219 KiB  
Article
Recovering a “Lost Europe”: The De-Centering of Master Narratives in Eyvind Johnson’s Natten är här
by Elliott J. Brandsma
Humanities 2021, 10(1), 46; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10010046 - 10 Mar 2021
Viewed by 2895
Abstract
A socially-engaged literary Modernist, whose writings possess an incisive skepticism toward political power, Eyvind Johnson (1900–1976) was a working-class autodidact who became a prominent voice in Swedish letters during the twentieth century. His historical novels have attracted the most critical attention to date, [...] Read more.
A socially-engaged literary Modernist, whose writings possess an incisive skepticism toward political power, Eyvind Johnson (1900–1976) was a working-class autodidact who became a prominent voice in Swedish letters during the twentieth century. His historical novels have attracted the most critical attention to date, but his short fiction from the 1920s reveals a young author increasingly suspicious of what postmodern theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard would later call master narratives—totalizing views of historical events that serve a political or universalized function. In “Kort Besök” (A Short Visit), “Det Förlorade Europa,” (The Lost Europe) and “En Man i Etolien” (A Man in Aetolia), from his 1932 short story collection Natten är här (The Night Has Come), Johnson’s characters resist and subvert various master narratives, maintaining their dignity and individuality in the face of destructive political, military or nationalistic agendas. Although his formal experimentation, introspective storytelling and narrative irresolution firmly situate him in the Modernist literary tradition, Johnson’s disruption of grand narratives about historical events in these stories previews postmodernity, with its radical interrogation of language’s subjugating power, suggesting a new avenue for evaluating and apprehending his literary innovations. Short fiction, thus, offers an accessible entryway into the complex art of Eyvind Johnson, whose intricate novels about centuries past have long resisted casual readership. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Faces of Swedish Modernity: Social Realism, Decadence, Modernism, Postmodernism)
12 pages, 234 KiB  
Article
Edith Södergran’s Genderqueer Modernism
by Benjamin Mier-Cruz
Humanities 2021, 10(1), 28; https://doi.org/10.3390/h10010028 - 5 Feb 2021
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3840
Abstract
This essay reads Edith Södergran’s poetic subject in Dikter (Poems) (1916) as multiple and, in their complex negotiation and revision of the cultural body assigned female at birth, representative of a gender expansiveness that we can identify today as trans and genderqueer. These [...] Read more.
This essay reads Edith Södergran’s poetic subject in Dikter (Poems) (1916) as multiple and, in their complex negotiation and revision of the cultural body assigned female at birth, representative of a gender expansiveness that we can identify today as trans and genderqueer. These queer readings of Södergran’s poems seek to move away from traditional interpretations of her work while resisting the application of fixed meanings onto them. Locating potential manifestations, opposed to identifications, of trans expression can open up new possibilities for understanding the complexity of Södergran’s writing and how contemporary readers can consider their own positionality as they navigate and renegotiate their place in the queer worlds Södergran built. This essay argues that Edith Södergran’s avant-gardist world-building of materially and aesthetically genderqueer poetic subjects contributes to her own revolutionary brand of Finland-Swedish modernism. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Faces of Swedish Modernity: Social Realism, Decadence, Modernism, Postmodernism)
10 pages, 225 KiB  
Article
“Incisive, Dissonant” Rationality vs. Aesthetic Modernism: Hedenius and Trotzig
by Ulf Olsson
Humanities 2020, 9(3), 103; https://doi.org/10.3390/h9030103 - 4 Sep 2020
Viewed by 2301
Abstract
The Swedish “Welfare State” of the 1950s was described as a rational, well-organized society by leading Swedish philosopher, Professor Ingemar Hedenius. His biopolitical vision emphasized the scientific basis for social reforms, and he was an active opponent to any kind of religious thinking. [...] Read more.
The Swedish “Welfare State” of the 1950s was described as a rational, well-organized society by leading Swedish philosopher, Professor Ingemar Hedenius. His biopolitical vision emphasized the scientific basis for social reforms, and he was an active opponent to any kind of religious thinking. Hedenius also worked as a literary critic, and he would use that role to confront literary representations of contemporary society that did not fit in with his promulgation of rationality. Hedenius furiously attacked Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig’s A Landscape (1959). In her book, she challenges any harmonizing vision of society. She does it through representations of the body, and the gaze that does not shy away from the anguished and pained body, the body opening up and giving birth. The body in Trotzig’s work is also the tortured body of Christ. With the Swedish welfare state as a point of reference, this article explores the collision between what can be called a “rational modernism” and aesthetic modernism: Hedenius called Trotzig’s book “evil,” and Trotzig, when she commented upon this almost three decades later, saw Hedenius’s review as an authoritarian assault. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Faces of Swedish Modernity: Social Realism, Decadence, Modernism, Postmodernism)
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