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This open access collection offers a detailed mapping of recent Nordic literature and its different genres (fiction, poetry, and children's literature) through the perspective of spatiality. Concentrating on contemporary Nordic literature, the book presents a distinctive view on the spatial turn and widens the understanding of Nordic literature outside of canonized authors. Examining literatures by Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish authors, the chapters investigate a recurrent theme of social criticism and analyze this criticism against the welfare state and power hierarchies in spatial terms. The chapters explore various narrative worlds and spaces-from the urban to parks and forests, from textual spaces to spatial thematics, studying these spatial features in relation to the problems of late modernity.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Storied Spaces of Contemporary Nordic Literature.- Part I Whose Place Is This Anyway? On the Social Uses of Space and Power.- 2. On the Commons: A Geocritical Reading of Amager Fælled.- 3. Mapping a Postmodern Dystopia: Hassan Loo Sattarvandi's Construction of a Swedish Suburb.- 4. Living Side by Side in an Individualized Society: Home, Place, and Social Relations in Late Modern Swedish-Language Picturebooks.- Part II Where Do You Feel? Spaces, Emotions, and Technology.- 5. Love, Longing, and the Smartphone: Lena Andersson, Vigdis Hjorth and Hanne Ørstavik.- 6. "Never Give Up Hopelessness!?": Emotions and Spatiality in Contemporary Finnish Experimental Poetry.- Part III Which Language Do You Use? Spaces of Language and Text.- 7. Stavanger, Pre- and Postmodern: Øyvind Rimbereid's Poetry and the Tradition of Topographic Verse.- 8. The Poetics of Blank Spaces and Intervals in Selected Works of Elisabeth Rynell.- 9. What Have They Done to My Song? Recycled Language in Monika Fagerholm's The American Girl.- Part IV Is This a Possible Space? Potentialities of Space.- 10. "A Geo-Ontological Thump": Ontological Instability and the Folding City in Mikko Rimminen's Early Prose.- 11. Uncanny Spaces of Transformation: Fabulations of the Forest in Finland-Swedish Prose.- 12. "The World in a Small Rectangle": Spatialities in Monika Fagerholm's Novels.- 13. The Miracle of the Mesh: Global Imaginary and Ecological Thinking in Ralf Andtbacka's Wunderkammer.
About the author
Kristina Malmio is University Lecturer, Adjunct Professor in Nordic Literature at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and leader of the research project “Late Modern Spatiality in Finland-Swedish Prose Literature.”
Kaisa Kurikka is Researcher and Adjunct Professor in the School of History, Culture, and Arts Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. She has a doctorate in Finnish Literature.
Summary
This open access collection offers a detailed mapping of recent Nordic literature and its different genres (fiction, poetry, and children’s literature) through the perspective of spatiality. Concentrating on contemporary Nordic literature, the book presents a distinctive view on the spatial turn and widens the understanding of Nordic literature outside of canonized authors. Examining literatures by Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish authors, the chapters investigate a recurrent theme of social criticism and analyze this criticism against the welfare state and power hierarchies in spatial terms. The chapters explore various narrative worlds and spaces—from the urban to parks and forests, from textual spaces to spatial thematics, studying these spatial features in relation to the problems of late modernity.
