Swedish Literature on the British Market 1998-2013: a Systemic

Swedish Literature on the British Market 1998-2013: A Systemic Approach Agnes Broomé A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy UCL Department of Scandinavian Studies School of European Languages, Culture and Society September 2014 2 I, Agnes Broomé, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. …............................................................................... 3 4 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the role and function of contemporary Swedish fiction in English translation on the British book market in the period 1998-2013. Drawing on Bourdieu’s Field Theory, Even Zohar’s Polysystem Theory and DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory, it constructs a model capable of dynamically describing the life cycle of border-crossing books, from selection and production to marketing, sales and reception. This life cycle is driven and shaped by individual position-takings of book market actants, and by their complex interaction and continual evolution. The thesis thus develops an understanding of the book market and its actants that deliberately resists static or linear perspectives, acknowledging the centrality of complex interaction and dynamic development to the analysis of publishing histories of translated books. The theoretical component is complemented by case studies offering empirical insight into the model’s application. Each case study illuminates the theory from a different angle, creating thereby a composite picture of the complex, essentially unmappable processes that underlie the logic of the book market. The first takes as its subject the British publishing history of crime writer Liza Marklund, as well as its wider context, the Scandinavian crime boom. The second case study considers the role of multi-platform mediality and media convergence in the case of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s vampire novel Let the Right One In. The Swedish contribution to Canongate’s Myth series, The Hurricane Party by Klas Östergren, is then examined through the lens of a globalising world literature. The final case study widens the scope to the institutional level by analysing the role and impact of the Swedish Arts Council’s efforts to disseminate Swedish literature abroad. Together, the case studies begin to illuminate the functioning of the contemporary translated fiction market in the UK, providing a nuanced understanding of the success of Swedish fiction in English translation. 5 6 CONTENTS Abstract -3- Acknowledgements -6- List of figures -7- Notes -9- Introduction -11- Part I Border-Crossing Literature: Context and Theoretical Framework -25- Chapter 1 Swedish literature and its transcultural contexts -27- Chapter 2 Theoretical framework and the construction of a network model -44- Part II Case Studies -79- 7 Chapter 3 The power of networks: the rise of Scandinavian crime fiction -83- Chapter 4 Beyond the field of literary production: multimodal polynetworks -121- Chapter 5 Core and periphery: asymmetries in the global network -160- Chapter 6 Swedish state support for Swedish literature abroad -194- Conclusion -223- Bibliography -238- Appendix A -269- Appendix B -284- 8 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am very grateful to my supervisors, Claire Thomson and Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, for giving me the opportunity to join the department and for their tireless support during my four years there. I am very lucky to have benefited from their help, insight and advice and, more than anything, the enthusiasm and creativity they bring to everything they do and never hesitate to share with colleagues and students. My time at UCL would not have been possible without the IMPACT studentship that fully funded my three years of research. I am very grateful to the people and organisations that contributed to this award, the Swedish Academy, The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, Stefan Olsson, UCL, and, especially, Carl Otto Werkelid and the Swedish Embassy in London for coordinating the funding and always being ready and willing to assist me in all my doings. I would like to give a special thank you to Karen Lawler, my excellent colleagues at the Department for Literary Sociology at Uppsala University, particularly Malin Nauwerck, whose graciousness in close quarters, both academic and physical, has never been less than total, the wonderful people at Quercus and Piratförlaget, Zoi Santikos, Susanne Bergström Larsson and Helen Sigeland at the Swedish Arts Council, Elettra Carbone, and my fellow PhD students, in the Department of Scandinavian Studies and elsewhere, who are always full of ideas and always have an encouraging word (and snack) to hand when needed. My biggest debt of gratitude is owed to my friends, especially Dr Peter Walsh, without whom I would never have started this journey, to my family, for their unswerving support, without which I would certainly have foundered along the way, and to Stephen Mayne, without whom I could never have finished. 9 10 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Number of titles translated from Swedish 1970-20009 35 Figure 2 Number of Swedish books published in English translation 1970-2009 39 Figure 3 Number of English-language titles 1970-2009 British Library catalogue 40 Figure 4 Generic distribution of English translations from Swedish, British Library catalogue 41 Figure 5 Number of children's/YA and crime fiction titles 1970-2009 British Library catalogue 42 Figure 6 Number of Swedish crime titles published annually in the United Kingdom 1970-2009 88 Figure 7 A selection of Swedish crime fiction titles in English translation 98 Figure 8 The transformation of Håkan Nesser's Kvinna med födelsemärke 99 Figure 9 The three Millennium titles and the revamped Woman with a Birthmark 100 Figure 10 Himlen är en plats på jorden and Frozen Tracks 101 Figure 11 The first nine titles in the Annika Bengtzon-series 109 Figure 12 The Annika Bengtzon-series in Eric Thunfors' design 110 Figure 13 The Annika Bengtzon-series as published by Corgi 112 Figure 14 The Swedish edition of Postcard Killers 115 The Postcard Killers and a selection of other James Patterson titles 116 11 Figure 16 The Postcard Killers and James Patterson's Now You See Her 117 Figure 17 First edition of Let the Right One In 137 Figure 18 Sales numbers in the UK for the first edition of Let the Right One In 138 Figure 19 First UK paperback edition of Let the Right One In 144 Figure 20 First US edition of Let me In 145 Figure 21 Film poster and second UK paperback edition of Let the Right One In 146 Figure 22 US and Australian film posters and tie-in editions with the Swedish film 147 Figure 23 Film posters for American film adaptation Let Me In and the British, Australian and American tie-in editions 148 Figure 24 Sales of Let the Right One In (book, all editions) 150 Figure 25 The seventeen Myth titles published in English to date 173 Figure 26 Map of global participation in the Myth series 178 Figure 27 Prevalence of the English language in the Myth series 179 and the world Figure 28 Number of titles published in the Myth series year by year in 179 English and other languages Figure 29 The more expensive hardback Swedish first edition and the 188 Demy paperback available in the UK Figure 30 Grants allocated by the Swedish Arts Council since 2010 for 217 the promotion of Swedish literature abroad 12 NOTES Some of the research in this thesis has been partially published in earlier and shorter versions: Broomé, Agnes (2014) ‘The Many Guises of the Book – Genre and Paratext in the Works of Liza Marklund’, in Illuminating the North: Proceedings from the Nordic Research Network Conference 2013. Norvik Press, London. Broomé, Agnes (2014) ‘The Exotic North, or How Marketing Created the Genre of Scandinavian Crime’, in True North: Literary Translation in the Nordic Countries, B.J. Epstein (ed.). Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge. * Unless otherwise stated, translations are the author’s own. * Sales numbers for books sold in the United Kingdom are from NielsenBookScan unless otherwise stated. 13 14 A book is never simply a remarkable object. Like every other technology it is invariably the product of human agency in complex and highly volatile contexts which a responsible scholarship must seek to recover D. E. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts * What we cannot produce in the end is a general and all-inclusive picture of such an ever-transient, ever-changing, ever-unbalanced situation. What we can do, with caution and good sense, is to build a good number of maps, showing some of the most interesting phenomena, with examples of some of the most permanent and some of the most transitional ones. Remo Cesareni, Studying Transcultural Literary History 15 16 Introduction In a speech given to the Swedish Academy in December 2003 under the heading Swedish Literature, an Export Good, author, literature scholar and member number sixteen of the Academy, Kjell Espmark, boldly stated that Swedish literature has experienced a “golden age” on the international scene since the 1940s, though this has “not often been acknowledged in those terms domestically” (Espmark, 2008, p. 46). Espmark’s remarks are a perceptive and accurate assessment of the situation, and points to two important truths about Swedish literature abroad. The first is that, in terms of literary exports, Sweden is and has been doing rather well for a long time. The other is that the Swedish discourse on the subject has long been suffused with a vague, and, as Espark implies, misplaced, sense of anxiety about the perceived under- performance of Swedish literature abroad. The beginning of the success of Swedish literature is of course difficult to pinpoint with any degree of accuracy. August Strindberg was successful and influential on the continent at the turn of the last century and Selma Lagerlöf did not only win a Nobel Prize in 1909 but has also been translated to around sixty languages.

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