Nordic Contributions

The year's scholarship from Denmark focuses on contemporary prose fiction, demonstrating a particular interest in Southern fiction and literature representing 9/11. Finnish and Norwegian scholars emphasize ethnic literatures. Notable work on short fiction continues to be produced in Norway and Sweden. American literary scholarship in Sweden predominantly concerns fiction from mid-20th century on, but substantial work is also devoted to 19th-century writing. This account of Nordic contributions to the study of American literature begins with a survey of the status of the field in Finland, which has not previously been well represented in AmLS.

While the first Finnish writings on American literature were published in the 1850s, the cultural and literary contact between the two nations remained slight until the end of the 19th century, when mass emigration from Finland to the United States began. Gradually an awareness of American literature emerged in Finland: the late 19th century saw the publication of several introductory essays on American authors in the literary magazines of the period as well as the translation of works by such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bret Harte, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper. Yet the majority of the books translated from English into Finnish remained British well into the 1930s. After World War II the nation's cultural orientation changed: Germany's former position of prestige was replaced with a rapidly increasing interest in cultural movements in Britain and the United States. In this process American literature and popular culture gained their current position of high popularity.

The development of the study of American literature is part of the same phenomenon. In the early 20th century few studies of American literature were conducted, apart from popular introductions often based on secondary sources. While Kirjallisuudentutkijain seuran vuosikirja (The Yearbook of Literary Research) had published several articles on American literature in the 1940s, the first doctoral dissertation on American literature was Nils Erik Enkvist's Caricatures of Americans on the English Stage Prior to 1870 (1951), a study exploring the introduction of distinctively American comic characters and humor to Britain. An early pioneer in the field, Enkvist conducted further studies on the reception of American humor in Britain and also published a volume surveying literary archival sources in the Nordic countries.

The following decade saw the publication of such important studies as Timo Tiusanen's O'Neill's Scenic Images (1968) and Sirkka Heiskanen-Mäkelä's In Quest of Truth: Observations on the Development of Emily Dickinson's Poetic Dialectic (1970), and the mid-1970s witnessed a widening of research topics. The most important scholars of the period, Ralf Norrman and Roger D. Sell, began their careers during this period. Norrman's studies of Henry James included Techniques of Ambiguity in the Fiction of Henry James with Special Reference to "In the Cage" and "The Turn of the Screw" (1978) and The Insecure World of Henry James's Fiction: Intensity and Ambiguity (1982). Sell's work on American literature concentrated on Robert Frost's manuscripts: in addition to his Robert Frost: Four Studies (1980), Sell edited for publication several Frost texts, most important Stories for Lesley (1984) and the plays In An Art Factory and The Guardeen (MR 26 [1985]: 265–340).

With the development of American literary theory in the 1980s, Finnish researchers started to apply new methods to their reading. Matti Savolainen, The Element of Stasis in William Faulkner: An Approach in Phenomenological Criticism (1987), relied on phenomenology, and Pirjo Ahokas, Forging a New Self: The Adamic Protagonist and the Emergence of a Jewish American Author Through the Novels of Bernard Malamud (1991), combined American studies scholarship with current critical theory. Both Savolainen and Ahokas have actively contributed to the development of American literature and literary theory in Finland through their various publications. Pekka Tammi's work on Vladimir Nabokov was based on narratology, as seen in the detailed readings in Problems of Nabokov's Poetics: A Narratological Analysis (1986).

The current trends in the study of American literature in Finland are mainly rooted in the concerns of the studies discussed above...