Scandinavian Contributions

Scandinavian contributions to American literary scholarship in 2003 were almost exclusively devoted to prose fiction written over the past two centuries. Southern writers continue to attract the interest of Scandinavian scholars, and gender perspectives remain a powerful frame of reference.

a. 20th-Century Poetry

Two contributions on poetry by Øyvind T. Gulliksen consider Richard Wright and Robert Bly. The recent translation by Finn Øgland of Wright's Collected Poems, Greina Brotnar Ikkje (Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget), is a welcome addition to American poetry in Norwegian. Most of the poems in this collection are taken from The Branch Will Not Break and Shall We Gather at the River. Øgland presents the poet and Greina by considering the influence of the author's stay in Minneapolis between 1957 and 1965 and his experiences with the nature of the region. "Nature and man in the Midwest," as Gulliksen puts it, "form the frame for Wright's meditations on life's shadows." Unlike the harmonious tension between a poetic "I" and the surrounding nature as we know it (e.g., as in Wordsworth) we instead find a conflict between boundaries that one "can cross only linguistically." Gulliksen explores this aspect of Wright's poetry using a number of illustrations from the collection and supplies an introduction that extends far beyond biographical detail.

In an interview with Wright's friend and fellow poet Bly, Gulliksen introduces a lesser-known aspect of his work in "'There Is Water Pouring Out of the Sky': Robert Bly on Norwegian Literature" (pp. 62–79 in Norsk Litteroer Årbok, ed. Jørgen Magnus Sejersted and Erik Vassenden [Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget]). This informative and humorous piece focuses on the influence Norwegian writers like Olav H. Hauge, Paal Brekke, Rolf Jacobsen, and Knut Hamsun have had on Bly's work, as well as his affinity for and use of Norwegian myths and folktales. The interview sheds light on Bly's long-standing work with translating and editing Norwegian poetry into English and adds a dimension to Bly's authorship that is rather unknown to American and Norwegian readers alike. Both of Gulliksen's pieces are in Norwegian.

b. 19th-Century Fiction

In "Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Realism, and Literary Debates on Changing Gender Roles" (pp. 87–111 in Realism and Its Discontents) Susan V. Donaldson adds an illuminating case-study to the ongoing reconstruction of the history of American literary realism. Donaldson sides with those critics who have recently been pushing back the starting date for realism to the antebellum period by noting the common use of realistic techniques by the so-called sentimental writers, many of whom were women. While the canonical literary realists certainly concerned themselves crucially with the issue of masculinity, they did so, Donaldson argues, as part of a larger debate over changing gender roles. In her examination of three Phelps novels, Donaldson makes the case that literary realism "served both male and female writers as an arena for exploring and critiquing changing gender roles, for posing possibilities for gender reversals, and even for redefining conventional notions of both femininity and masculinity." In the antiauthoritarian religious novel The Gates Ajar, in the critique of traditional marriage of The Story of Avis, and in the gender role reversals plotted in Doctor Zay, Phelps adopts a literary realism that attacks abstract conventions, not least those which define manhood and womanhood.

Those conventions are also at stake in Justin D. Edwards's "Engendering a New Republic: Charles Brockden Brown's Alcuin, Carwin and the Legal Fictions of Gender" (Nordic Journal of English Studies 2, ii: 279–301), which examines "meditations on the gendered hierarchies of the law" in two of Brown's lesser-known works. In the former a discussion between Alcuin and Mrs. Carter moves from Federalism to a sharp rejection of the laws that exclude women from political functions and becomes an illustration of the slipperiness of the law. The "male voice of authority" has the ability to revise the law and therefore maintains its fixity as a tool of command and coercion. The law relies for its unity and order on...