This multi-volume project, sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association, is one of a series of regional literary histories that offer analysis of the large and complex interaction of literary cultures as they have developed over time. (For links to the other volumes in the series click HERE.) Organized around the idea of region instead of nation, this literary history does not define its object through similarity of linguistic group, citizenship, or ethnicity, but instead geographically as the sum of all the literary cultures that have existed in a certain area. In this case, that entity is “Norden” (The North).
Consequently, the project examines both the shared and divergent literary cultures that have emerged in this area throughout history. This history is dynamic, with shifting borders and affinities that do not necessarily correspond to the modern notions of nation, nor of “Norden” itself. Shared literary culture—what people write, read, tell and perform (what Linda Hutcheon has called “complex verbal art”) —is often a function of geographic centers and peripheries, mediating institutions, routes of transmission and translation, and other forms of contact not coterminous with language groups or national affiliations.
The four planned volumes of the project, to be published sequentially, deal with temporal nodes, spatial nodes, figural nodes, and nodes of transmission.
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