Nordic Literature: A Comparative History Steven P. Sondrup and Mark B. Sandberg VOLUME 1: SPATIAL NODES Volume editors: Dan Ringgaard and Thomas A. DuBois During the course of the last year, work on the first volume of Nordic Literature: A Comparative History has made significant progress, most notably the completion of the first of three anticipated volumes. The finished manuscript, which runs 1792 pages (using the wider editing margins, double line spacing, and citations in both the original and English translations), has been submitted for review by outside readers along with this report. Based on previous publications by Benjamins in the CHLEL series, we estimate the printed size of this first volume to be just over 600 pages. Its basic outline remains same as described in recent years, although after discussion at the last CHLEL committee meeting in Siena, the title has been changed to that listed above. The first half (organized and introduced by Dan Ringgaard) is devoted to the identification of topographical constructs—“scapes”—that have been particularly important in Nordic literary imagination; the second half (organized and introduced by Thomas A. DuBois) shifts the analysis to emphasize the literary depiction of the way real places are used and transformed by human activity—“practices.” The underlying challenge of this first volume is to approach literary history in a way that acknowledges the importance of spatiality, thereby redressing the imbalance that results from the predominantly chronological approach that has obtained since the early nineteenth century. The organization, taken from the final table of contents, is as follows: General Introduction (Steven P. Sondrup and Mark B. Sandberg) Framework (Dan Ringgaard and Thomas A. DuBois) Scapes: Landscapes (Dan Ringgaard) Point of Contact: The Intricacies of Snæfellsjökull (Ástráður Eysteinsson) A Guide to Gurre, Temporary Landscape (Jan Rosiek) Utopias as Territories of Swedish Modernism (Sylvain Briens) Jutland and the West Coast as Liminal Spaces in Danish Literature (Wolfgang Behschnitt) “Far Higher Mountains”: Mountains in Danish and Norwegian Romantic Poetry (Louise Mønster) South of the South: Literary Capri (Arne Melberg) Scapes: Cityscapes (Dan Ringgaard) Through the Land of Lagom in Literature: Passing Small Towns in Middle Sweden (Anna Smedberg Bondesson) A City Awakens: Literary Helsinki at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Lieven Ameel) Walking the City: Female Pedestrians (Tone Selboe) The Limits of the Unlimited: Gunnar Björling’s Wordscape (Anders Olsson) The History Accumulator: Berlin as a Foreign Metropolis (Thomas Mohnike) Poets in New York (Anne-Marie Mai) Scapes: Lightscapes (Dan Ringgaard) Myth & Meaning of Foreign Lightscapes in Nordic Literatures 1: The Imaginary Elsewhere (Svend Erik Larsen) Myth & Meaning of Foreign Lightscapes in Nordic Literatures 2: The Geographic Elsewhere (Svend Erik Larsen) Qualities of Light: Interfacing Lightscapes in Eino Leino, Hella Wuolijoki, and Arvid Mörne (Pia Maria Ahlbäck) Glocalizing the Light of Norwg-West: From Inner Light to the Light of Labor (Per Thomas Andersen) Scapes: Millenniumscapes (Dan Ringgaard) Toxic Places: Chernobyl and a Sense of Place in Nordic Literature (Christopher Oscarson) This Site is Under Construction: Mediating the Øresund Region around the Millennium (C. Claire Thomson and Pei-Sze Chow) Cathartic Moments or Spatial Liberty: Variations of the Interplay between Fiction, Play, and Place in Computer Games (Bo Kampmann Walther) Practices of Place: Introduction (Thomas A. DuBois) Practices: Settling (Thomas A. DuBois) “And the Two Shall Become One Flesh”: Forging Familial Ties to the New Land in Nordic-American Immigrant Literature (Julie K. Allen) Taking Land and Claiming Place in Nordic Migrant Literature (Ingeborg Kongslien) Radical Utopianism among Nordic Immigrant Authors (Thomas A. DuBois) Practices: Dwelling (Thomas A. DuBois) Seasonal Secondary Dwellings (Ellen Rees) “Worker Ants on the Lush Bosom of Earth”: Cyclic Patterns of Life in the Finnish Countryside (Leena Kaunonen) By Land, by Sea, by Air, by Mind: Traversing Externally Internally via the Trope of the Bird in Finnish and Swedish Poetry (Kjerstin Moody) Practices: Exploring (Thomas A. DuBois) The Literary Arctic (Henning Howlid Wærp) Dislocation and Identity Formation in the Work of Isak Dinesen (Susan C. Brantly) Absorbing Places and the Triumph of Modernity: Hans Christian Andersen (Karin Sanders) Northern Bound: Exploring and Colonizing the Nordic Far North (Thomas A. DuBois) Practices: Sacralizing (Thomas A. DuBois) Niðaróss Cathedral (Steven P. Sondrup) Legend and Liminality (Timothy Tangherlini) Liminality: The Uncanny Bog (Karin Sanders) Nation and Sacrifice: Abraham and Isaac in Modern Scandinavian Literature (Elisabeth Oxfeldt) Worlding (Troy Storfjell) Fishing for Meaning on the Deatnu River: Sámi Salmon Harvesters, Tourist Anglers, and the Negotiation of Place (Tim Frandy) De-Framing the Indigenous Body: Ethnography, Landscape, and Cultural Belonging in the Art of Pia Arke (Kirsten Thisted) Works Cited (presented as a synthetic bibliography for the entire volume) In the preparation of this manuscript for our first volume, two deviations from traditional practice should be mentioned: 1. Although prior volumes (with the exception of Marcel Cornis-Pope’s recent New Literary Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression) contain essentially no illustrations, 76 of the 1792 pages of the Nordic Literature volume include images that have been placed in the manuscript at locations suggested by the authors or editors. This approach seemed necessary for a volume devoted to a spatial approach to literary history. Nevertheless, we have avoided what might be called a purely encyclopedic approach to illustration and have made a concerted effort to be certain that each image enhances the meaning of the text conceptually (often through juxtaposition with other images) or informationally (especially in the use of maps and representations of topographical features and cultural artifacts that might not be familiar to readers from more southerly climes). 2. Typically translations into English have been provided in the text while the original is presented in a footnote. In Nordic Literature: A Comparative History (as authorized by a unanimous vote of the Coordinating Committees at its meeting in Lisbon June 6, 2011) primary source languages will appear followed by a translation of that quotation into English drawn from, when available, the published critical edition. The submitted manuscript for volume 1 in our series thus follows that practice. As requested, we have also submitted a list of potential referees for the project, understanding that the final choice of readers is up to the CHLEL committee. Since the project has drawn on both the expertise of North American and European Scandinavianists and comparatists (and indeed depends for its perspective on the interplay academic perspectives inside and outside the region, we have represented both groups in our list of suggested readers. VOLUME 2: TEMPORAL NODES Volume Editors: John Lindow and Timothy Tangherlini Even though volume 2 of the project was not the main workflow priority this year, it has nevertheless made modest progress in its editorial work during the year (a BYU student has been working steadily on source checking for the essays in this volume on a weekly basis). We are aware, however, that a significant reboot effort is necessary, one that can reasonably be accomplished now that the first volume of the series has been submitted to readers and is not demanding so much of the general editors’ time. The volume on the temporal nodes of Nordic literary history had originally been planned as the first in the series, but since the two volume editors who initially organized the contributions (Lindow and Tangherlini) have been much less active in follow-through than anticipated, the publication of the other volumes has jumped ahead in order of finishing. We raised the possibility at last year’s CHLEL committee meeting that our volume 3 might appear ahead of our volume 2 and were assured that that procedure was not totally without precedent. The essays in this volume on Temporal Nodes were drafted several years ago now, so it will be necessary to recontact contributors and give them the opportunity to revise and update their contributions as needed. We did something similar this last year with our volume 1 contributors, since there too a significant amount of time had passed in some cases since the date of original submission. Our experience with that process was that most contributors were more than willing to revisit their essays and make changes to reflect more recent scholarship when necessary, so we expect that will be the case here as well, although we have also learned that it is important to make individual contact with each individual rather than communicating en masse with the contributors. The more important experience from completing volume 1, however, was seeing more clearly how to bring the essays together conceptually in the different nodal sections through the preparation of the introductory materials. Since we (Sondrup and Sandberg) expect that much of that remaining work for volume 2 will fall to us, we have held off on starting the editorial process until we could be confident that we would have the time to follow through consistently. Now that volume 1 has been submitted (and since there will be some time before volume 3 is ready for the