Pirjo Lyytikinen - Nordic Literature of Decadence

Nordic Literature of Decadence fills a gap on the map of world literature and participates in a thriving area of research by extending the investigation of broadly understood fin de sicle decadence to unexplored areas of Nordic literature, which remain practically unknown to Anglophone audiences. In the Nordic countries, the new Parisian movements were seen as having caused a malicious invasion, a black flood that was spreading over the North destroying the very foundations of Nordic national cultures. Nevertheless, the appeal of this controversial movement was irresistible to discontents and innovators, even in countries where the old moral, religious and nationalist atmosphere still retained its stranglehold and modern urban, industrial and social developments lagged behind that of the metropoles breeding this new literature and art.

The Nordic countries developed their own distinctive manifestations of decadence favoring allegorical and allusive forms, local rural settings and depictions of primitive nature, coupling the philosophical underpinnings of fin-de-sicle decadence with ancient Nordic mythology and rising national movements. Nordic decadence thus became a distinctive and recognizable phenomenon, which traveled back to France and other European countries, influencing the ongoing debate on decadence as it was conducted on a global scale.

Nordic Literature of Decadence discusses literature from five Nordic countries: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Estonia and offers additional and alternative perspectives to the cosmopolitan traffic and cultural exchanges of literary decadence that have been explored so far in the English language scholarship.

Pirjo Lyytikinen is Professor of Finnish Literature at the University of Helsinki, and a specialist in symbolism and decadence. She has published extensively on Finnish decadence and its relationship to French and Nordic decadence.

Riikka Rossi is a Docent of Finnish literature at the University of Helsinki. She is a specialist in literary naturalism, and her main interests include the poetics of naturalism from a comparative perspective, primitivism and the study of literature and emotions.

Viola Parente-apkov is a Researcher and a Project Leader at the University of Turku. Her major research interests are decadent and symbolist literature in a comparative European perspective and transnational networks of fin de sicle women writers.

Mirjam Hinrikus is currently a Senior Researcher at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on discourses of decadence, and antifeminism and feminism in Estonian literature and culture.

Edited by Dennis Denisoff

This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature, art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social, technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the Victorians and Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited to, artistic and cultural debates and movements; influential figures and communities; and agitations and developments regarding subjects such as animals, commodification, decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire, ecology, gender, nationalism, the paranormal, performance, public art, sex, socialism, spiritualities, transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that address continuities between the Victorians and Modernists are welcome. Work on recent responses to the periods such as Neo-Victorian novels, graphic novels, and film will also be considered.

15 Fieldwork of Empire, 18401900

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Adrian S. Wisnicki

16 Threatened Masculinity from British Fiction (18801915) to Cold-War German Cinema

Joseph P. Willis

17 Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal

The Mothers Son

James Martell

18 Nordic Literature of Decadence

Edited by Pirjo Lyytikinen, Riikka Rossi, Viola Parente-apkov and Mirjam Hinrikus

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Among-the-Victorians-and-Modernists/book-series/ASHSER4035

First published 2020

by Routledge

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2020 Taylor & Francis

The right of Pirjo Lyytikinen, Riikka Rossi, Viola Parente-apkov, and Mirjam Hinrikus to be identified as the author[/s] of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 978-0-367-11238-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-02552-5 (ebk)

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Claes Ahlund has been Professor of Comparative Literature at bo Akademi University, Finland, since 2010. Before that, he worked at Uppsala University, where he received his PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature in 1990, and at Mid Sweden University. His publications include Medusas huvud (The Head of Medusa, 1994), on decadence in Swedish literature; Diktare i krig (Poets in War, 2007) on Swedish political poetry around the First World War; and Underhllning och propaganda (Entertainment and Propaganda, 2010) on popular war novels. He is currently working on a book about images of Finland and Russia in Swedish nineteenth-century literature.

Antti Ahmala is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, where he received his PhD in Finnish literature in 2016. His doctoral dissertation examines the themes of authenticity and alienation in the early decadent works of the Finnish author Joel Lehtonen (18811934) in relation to Nietzschean thinking. Ahmalas current research project explores the continuation of fin de sicle antimodern thought in contemporary literature with a focus on Finnish contemporary essayists.

Guri Ellen Barstad is Professor of French Literature at Ostfold University College, Norway, having previously worked at the University of Troms, Norway. Her publications include Mademoiselle Maupin de Thophile Gautier. Arabesques et identits fluctuantes (2006). She has published articles in collections and journals, including Excavatio, Romansk forum, French Literature Series and Aiolos, on Jean Lorrain, Isabelle Eberhardt, Gautier, Rachilde and a number of Norwegian authors from the 1880s, in addition to Jean Giono, the subject of her doctoral dissertation.

Susan Brantly