LIR.skrifter Yvonne Leffler SwediSh NiNeteeNth- CeNtury NovelS aS world literature Transnational Success and Literary History LIR.skrifter.11 Yvonne Leffler Swedish Nineteenth-Century Novels as World Literature: Transnational Success and Literary History LIR.skrifter.11 © LIR skrifter & författaren 2020 Form: Richard Lindmark Tryck: BrandFactory AB, Kållered 2020 iSbN: 978-91-88348-99-9 CoNteNtS aCkNowledgemeNtS 7 iNTRODUCTION 9 SwediSh Narrative FiCtioN iN translatioN iN the early aNd mid-NiNeteeNth CeNtury 17 Romantic verse tales in general and Esaias Tegnér’s Frithiofs saga in particular 18, Swedish mid-nineteenth-century novels in translation 21, Carl Jonas Love Almqvist in translation in the nineteenth century and onwards 27, Launching Almqvist – titles and publishing strategies 30 the Success oF three womeN writerS 45 Fredrika Bremer, Emilie Flygare-Carlén, and Marie Sophie Schwartz 45, The breakthrough of Bremer and Flygare-Carlén: translation into German via Danish 45, The early success in the Anglophone world 50, Translation into French and introduction into the Latin regions 55, The bestselling follower: Schwartz 58, Two Swedish success stories in Central and Eastern Europe: Flygare-Carlén and Schwartz 60, Translation into other Nordic languages and thereafter 65 highbrow iNtelleCtualS at home, StorytellerS For ChildreN abroad 83 Zacharias Topelius and Viktor Rydberg 83, Topelius in translation 84, ’ ’ Rydberg in translation 89, Topelius s and Rydberg s reception outside Sweden 93, Promotion by female predecessors and successors 98 launchiNg aNd transnatioNal reCeptioN oF mid-NiNeteeNth CeNtury NoveliStS 109 Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, Fredrika Bremer, Emilie Flygare-Carlén, and Marie Sophie Schwartz 109, Publishing strategies: titles, collections, and series 111 The transnational reception: reviews, reportage, and other reception events 118, Almqvist, the writer and person in the international press 118, The early reception of Bremer and Flygare-Carlén 122, The later and secondary reception of Bremer, Flygare-Carlén, and Schwartz 127 SwediSh NovelS aNd womeN writerS 145 Why novels by women writers? 147, Awarding celebrity status 152, Changing literary status 155, Contemporary reception versus evaluation by posterity 160, Swedish nineteenth-century novels as world literature? 167 appeNdix 1 175 appeNdix 2 183 bibliography 189 Index 203 AckNowledgemeNtS thiS Study oN Swedish nineteenth-century novels as world literature was initiated within the research project “Swedish Women’s Writing on Export in the Nineteenth century”, which resulted in two previous volumes within this series. Also in the process of writing this book, I have incurred many debts. First, I would like to thank Riksbankens Jubileums fond for the Advancement of the Humanities and Social Sciences for one year funding in 2019. Without their financial support, it would not have been possible for me to conclude this study within a year. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Department of lite rature, history of ideas, and Religion at the University of Gothenburg for support to publish this book. Second, I am immensely indebted to my three expert readers Gunilla Hermansson, Åsa Arping, and Birgitta Johansson Lindh, whose comments and suggestions have been both astute and useful. Thanks also to Béla Leffler for his help with the -re search database SWED and for preparing the graphs included in this book. Finally yet importantly, I am grateful to Richard Lindmark for his professional help with editing and preparing my manuscript for printing and for designing the cover of the book. 7 iNTRODUCTION today, SCaNdiNaviaN literature is recognised for its crime fiction and children’s stories. In the early twenty-first century, The Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson was an international blockbuster, and TV pro- ductions, such as The Crime (Forbrydelsen) and The Bridge (Bron), have resulted in several remakes by international production teams. Children all over the world are familiar with Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, Selma Lagerlöf’s Nils Holgersson, and Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid. Nowadays, Scandinavian culture is well known abroad. Despite their small populations and the limited number of native speakers, Sweden and Denmark are among the world’s top 10 exporters of fiction, which means that both Swedish and Danish are more prominent as literary languages than might be expected.1 The worldwide success of Scandinavian fiction is far from a recent phenomenon. Many scholars are familiar with the impact of the so- called Modern Breakthrough of Scandinavian literature at the fin de siècle and the dramas by Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. Less known is the first wave of Swedish novels from the 1830s onwards. As early as in the 1820s and 1830s, readers outside Sweden welcomed Esaias Tegnér’s romantic verse tale, Frithiofs saga (1825; Frithiof’s Saga), a tale of heroic Viking deeds and unhappy love. From 1840, Fred ri ka Bremer and Emilie Flygare-Carlén were among the most wide- ly read novelists in Europe and the United States. They were often mar- keted together with other famous and top-selling European novelists, such as Charles Dickens and Eugène Sue. The international reception of their stories illustrates how nineteenth-century literature travelled in translation and how the first Swedish novelists paved the way for the 9 reception of the Scandinavian writers of the fin de siècle. By compil- ing and analysing data from digitised archives online, I will present a new view of the early Swedish novel, a history that concentrates on the international reception of Swedish novels written in the mid-nineteenth century, mainly between 1830 and 1870. In previous case studies, my colleagues and I have demonstrated the transnational success of Swedish women writers in the nineteenth century until World War I, particularly in comparison to the contem- porary dissemination of today’s canonised male writers. The investiga- tion concentrated on five female authors, two of whom, Bremer and Flygare-Carlén, were novelists in the mid-nineteenth century.2 A second study on the dissemination of Swedish novels in Eastern Europe in- cluded another bestselling Swedish novelist, Marie Sophie Schwartz.3 The aim of this study is to expand on the earlier case studies by adding male novelists and broadening the investigation of Swedish authors’ transnational reception up to the present. My objective is to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the dissemination of the most circulated Swedish nineteenth-century novelists – both male and female – by map- ping published translations of their novels outside Sweden from first date of publication until 2018. Furthermore, I examine and compare the responses to their novels in the international press, newspapers, and literary journals. The investigation is focused on the reception of the six most popular and acknowledged novelists at the time – from both a national and international perspective: Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, Fredrika Bremer, Emilie Flygare-Carlén, Marie Sophie Schwartz, Zacharias Topelius, and Victor Rydberg. In order to identify general trends in relation to publishing strategies, genre classifications, and cultural and gender- related matters, as well as to describe certain exceptions from the ruling pattern, the reception of the six above-mentioned novelists is compared to that of other contemporary Swedish writers. The most central refer- ence writers are Sophie von Knorring, August Blanche, Carl Fredrik Ridderstad, Carl Anton Wetterbergh (pen name: Onkel Adam), and Esaias Tegnér. By comparing the treatment of these writers, my inten- tion is to examine to what extent genre, source culture, and the gender of the writer mattered. To what extent were the novels launched as Scandinavian/Swedish novels or as European novels? To what degree did publishers, translators, and critics promote their novels as belong- ing to a certain genre, such as romances, domestic novels, and realist novels? How much were the biographical, geographical, and cultural background of the writer highlighted? To what degree is it possible to discern certain changes in marketing and reception over time? Thus, 10 my aim is to examine notable differences in the reception of the writers as well as changes relating to target regions and languages, cultural contexts and periods. Moreover, I draw attention to the inconsistency between inter- national success in the mid- and late nineteenth century and future canonisation in the national Swedish literary history, along with its consequences for the nineteenth-century writers’ posthumous reputa- tion and transnational status today. I point at the complex relation between translation, nation-based history, and the evolving system of world literature. I contest the prevailing national model of writing liter- ary history. Inspired by Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés’s call to rethink literary history in 2002, I put forward a new perspective on today’s literary history and its construction.4 In so doing, I address and challenge David Damrosh’s previous discussions on canonisation pro- cedures aiming at a new understanding of literary history by returning to the importance of transnational perspectives in order to understand the construction of cultural heritage.5 The transnational turn in the writing of literary history has brought about an intense and ongoing theoretical and methodological discus- sion as well as a new terminology within the fields of new compara- tive literature, translation