Victorian Studies in Sweden

Until about a quarter of a century ago, Swedish research on English literature was almost exclusively associated with the four traditional universities – Lund, Uppsala, Stockholm, and Gothenburg – whose English Departments used to employ one professor, one reader, anda couple of senior lecturers specializing in literature. In the 1980s, occasional employees at the new universities of Umeå and Linköping began to produce work in the field. The next decade was dominatedby a veritable explosion in tertiary education which created dozens of new provincial university colleges, some of which have since obtained university status. Before the 1990s, only about twenty-five senior scholars in Sweden were active in the Eng. Lit. field. After the Big Bang, the number was more than doubled; but the proportions of the subject are still modest in an international comparison.

Within the boundaries of this small Swedish discipline, researchon Victorian literature has long been a significant special area. (The question of whether it is likely to remain so will be raised later in this report.) Reviewing the scholarly output that Victorian studies in Sweden have generated, it is hard to discern any connection between that output and the country where it was actually produced: Swedish Eng.Lit. scholars write and publish in English, orientate themselves towards critical debates in English-speaking countries, and rely on British and American research libraries. However, the predominance of fiction in their work suggests a possible 'local' reason for their interest in the Victorian age: juvenile acquaintance with the great Victorian novels, whose romantic appeal trumped the not inconsiderable but decidedly more douce virtues of the homegrown products.

Some Swedish work in the Victorian field has attained standard-work status and been published, or republished, by leading academic publishers in the English-speaking world. Inga-Stina Ewbank's still indispensable book on the Brontës, Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Brontë Sisters as Early-Victorian Novelists, brought out by Arnold and by Harvard University Press in 1966, was the outcome of graduate work in Gothenburg. Lennart A. Björk's The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy appeared from Macmillan in 1985, and Marianne Thormählen's The Brontës and Religion was published by Cambridge University Press in 1999. Alvar Ellegård's Darwin and the General Reader, a study of Darwin's reception in the periodical press first published in Gothenburg in 1958, reappeared from University of Chicago Press in 1990.

Interestingly enough, however, other books by Swedish scholars have asserted themselves in the international arena without the cachet of international publication. Thus, for instance, any work on George Meredith's fiction is likely to include a reference to Sven-JohanSpånberg, whose dissertation on The Ordeal of Richard Feverel was printed in Studia Anglistica Upsaliensa in 1974, a year which also saw the publication of his important article on 'The Theme of Sexuality in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel' (Studia Neophilologica 46). In the same year, Harriet Björk's thesis The Language of Truth: Charlotte Brontë, the Woman Question, and the Novel appeared in Lund Studies in English; as the years went by, it came to be generally recognized as a pioneering feminist work on Charlotte Brontë. Lennart Björk's study Psychological Vision and Social Criticism in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (Stockholm Studies in English, 1987) is well known in Hardy circles worldwide.

Those scholars in the English-speaking countries who have dis-covered the work published in Swedish academic series have come to nourish a healthy respect for it. The unglamorous covers of Studia Anglistica Upsaliensa and of Lund, Stockholm, and Gothenburg Studies in English enclose a wealth of valuable research in the Victorian field, such as Ishrat Lindblad on evolution and Shaw and HaraldW. Fawkner on Dickens' vision of the life-denying society (Uppsala, 1971 and 1977); Monica Correa Fryckstedt on Elizabeth Gaskell and Geraldine Jewsbury (Uppsala, 1982 and 1986); Barbro Almqvist Norbelie on the early George Eliot and Christina Sjöholm on the theme of marriage in George Gissing (Uppsala, 1992 and 1994); Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström on Charlotte Yonge's domestic fiction and Helena Granlund on self-love in...