Nordic Contributions

This year's scholarship from Denmark focuses solely on prose fiction, though it covers a broad chronological spectrum, from the 19th century to the new millennium. Norwegian scholarship is represented by a major monograph on 19th-century literature, and Finnish contributions favor ethnic and transnational literatures. The majority of the Swedish Americanists' contributions deal with 20th- and 21st-century literature.

a. 19th-Century Literature

Axel Nissen's Manly Love is a comprehensive and refreshing rereading of late-19th-century works by, among others, Mark Twain, Henry James, and W. D. Howells, and lesser-known figures such as Drude Krog Janson and Bayard Taylor, which brings to light a discourse pertaining to the intimacy, spirituality, and joy of "romantic friendship." In Nissen's hands this term becomes a trope for unearthing the hidden treasures of an aestheticized and sensualized language that can help us "understand better . . . representations of love between men in the nineteenth-century United States." This is not, however, a book revising the personal lives of authors; instead, Nissen shows the reader that amid its anxieties Victorian United States harbored a sensitivity to and a concomitant, if overlooked, representation of friendship fiction. The two initial chapters in Manly Love provide a historical and theoretical sweep in relation to the cultural, historical, and literary backdrop against which this discourse finds its place, and draws on a number of brief and concise illustrations from various novels, letters, and short stories. Different from contemporary literary output shelved in the "gay section," works celebrating "brotherly love" in the latter half of the 19th century were, Nissen suggests, in fact written by some of the most influential writers of the period and for a most general audience. Thus what he calls the fiction of romantic friendship "was one of the most culturally central subgenres of the novel during these decades." The texts closely read in the next five chapters include Theodore Winthrop's Cecil Dreeme and its register of different models of relations between men and between men and women, Henry James's Roderick Hudson in the company of a feminist such as Eliza B. Duffey, Norwegian American Drude Krog Janson's A Saloonkeeper's Daughter on love between women as possibly superior to marriage, and Twain's Huck Finn and the discourse of "American manhood and the ways in which men might interact with and love each other." Manly Love concludes with some notes on literature's role in historicizing "the realm of ideas about gender, sex(uality) and the affective life." Here Nissen refers mostly to "mutual, intimate, and committed" male relations in W. D. Howells's works, using the neologism "homofiliation" to gauge the way these relations form and develop in the course of narratives. Nissen's study rethinks not only the specific issues and discourses pertaining to romantic friendship as these shine through in literature but also an entire literary and cultural period in American history.

Inger Hunnerup Dalsgaard's "Producing and Consuming Passions: Women Workers and Writing Desires in Melville's New England" (Double Dialogues 10: n.p.) places Herman Melville's diptych "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" in the context of its time and culture. Melville "envisions results of (self) control on the sexual identity of women once suspended between traditional paternalistic models." Dalsgaard argues that women did not escape commodification as the role of their sexuality was undergoing changes in a new industrial environment. Looking at texts written in The Lowell Offering and The New England Offering by such women, Dalsgaard demonstrates how women workers combined their new roles as economic producers and producers of texts to avoid masculinization by reinventing themselves as a new type of commodity. Taking part in what had been a predominantly masculine mode of production in Europe, (industrial and literary) American society colluded in making these women producers and agents only of their own popular and personal reinscription as objects.

In "Fanatiska häxor och måxngsidiga hjältinnor: Medelklasskvinnors utbildning i amerikanska 1820-tals romaner" ("Fanatical Witches and Versatile Heroines: The Education of Middle-Class Women in American Novels...