Brilliant. The work of Scobbie and company deserves wide distribution-World Literature Today. This is the best single volume history of modern Swedish literature available and this new edition makes it even better. With over one hundred pages of ne
This collection brings together for the first time select works in English by the major Swedish modernist poet and critic Goran Printz-Pahlson. It was Printz-Pahlson who introduced poetic modernism to Scandinavia, and his essays and poems delve deeply into English, American, and continental modernist traditions. As well as "Letters of Blood," the collection includes the full text of "The Words of the Tribe," a major statement on modern poetics, in which Printz-Pahlson explores the significance of primitivism in Romanticism and Modernism, and the nature of metaphor and literary materialism. The collection also includes essays on style, irony, realism, and the relationship between historical drama and historical fiction, as well as studies of American poetry. Printz-Pahlson's poetry in English continues to explore these themes by different, often surprisingly innovative, means. Minor edits to this book have been made in May 2016.
August Strindberg's novel The Red Room centers on the civil servant Arvid Falk as he tries to find meaning in his life through the pursuit of writing. He's accompanied by a crew of painters, sculptors and philosophers each on their own journey for the truth, who meet in the "Red Room" of a local restaurant.Drawing heavily on August's own experiences, The Red Room was published in Sweden in 1879. Its reception was less than complimentary in Sweden--a major newspaper called it "dirt"--but it fared better in the rest of Scandinavia and soon was recognised in his home country. Since then it has been translated into multiple languages, including the 1913 English translation by Ellise Schleussner presented here.
Modern Swedish Prose in Translation was first published in 1979. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. These excerpts from Swedish prose works - mostly novels - reflect major shifts in mood and style in the 25 years since 1950. Editor Karl Erik Lagerlof traces cultural and political developments in Sweden from the post-World War II era, when writers felt themselves in a world devoid of political meaning and rejected realism as a literary mode, down to the intensely political years of the Vietnam era. The selections in this anthology range from the anti-ideological works of the postwar years to recent documentary methods influenced by Marxism, structuralism, and a renewed political consciousness.
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.
This nineteenth-century Swedish classic that satirizes Stockholm society is “a scathing attack on every aspect of modern life” (Rosalind Porter, The Guardian, “1000 Novels Everyone Must Read”). Disillusioned with chasing such meaningless achievements as wealth and influence, Arvid Falk leaves his career as a civil servant to embark on a life of artistic pursuits. He longs for the freedom that becoming a writer will offer him, much to the chagrin of his older brother who has conned him out of part of his inheritance. But Falk’s journey towards beauty and meaning hits a few speedbumps. The counterculture characters he once envied are in reality no better or worse than the cogs in the corporate machine. They’re faux intellectuals willing to sell out to the highest bidder, kowtowing to the mainstream sensibility they pretend to deplore. The enlightenment that Falk seeks is nowhere to be found. In this witty study of human nature, August Strindberg skewers the institutions of art, politics, capitalism, religion, and rebellion. Nothing is safe from his keen observations on the hypocrisy of modern society.