Nordic Contributions

This year this section consists of contributions from Denmark, Finland, and Norway. The emphasis is on contemporary prose literature, but the year’s publications also show increased interest in such forms as the graphic novel and the grotesque. Danish scholars have produced significant work in Southern literature, Finnish contributions include a significant monograph on American literary theory, and several Norwegian scholars contribute to the study of postmodern narrative.

a. 19th-Century Literature

Two scholars focus on 19th-century narratives. In “Edgar Allan Poe: Southern Writer, Critic, and Editor,” pp. 9–35 in Minodora Barbul et al., eds., Edgar Allan Poe: The Bicentennial 1809–2009 (Baia Mare, Romania: Editura Universtatii de Nord), Jan Nordby Gretlund argues that Poe becomes easier to understand if we keep in mind that he was a Virginia gentleman of his time and place. The essay outlines his good education and his conservative stance on politics, including slavery. Finally, Gretlund reads Poe as a Southern stoic and goes on to argue that because of the Civil War and civil rights battles, it seems impossible today to comprehend the meaning of the word “Southern” in the 1830s. Sirpa Salenius’s “Defining America through the ‘International Theme’: Nathaniel Parker Willis’s Paul Fane (1857)” (StAmericanC 34: 51–66) reads Parker’s little-known Italy-set Künstler-roman as an early contribution to the international novel. What distinguishes Willis’s work, based on his firsthand knowledge of Florence, is the privileging of American values and social structures over those of Europe: the success of the self-made artist is also a representation of the triumphant self-reliant American individual.

b. Poetry to the Mid-20th Century

The study of American poetry is not a popular field of research in Finland. Jarkko Toikkanen’s “The Unnaturalness of Nature: Robert Frost’s ‘The Fear,’” pp. 211–34 in Markku Salmela and Jarkko Toikkanen, eds., The Grotesque and the Unnatural (Cambria), applies a variety of approaches from Kantian idealism to word and image studies to a Frost poem often analyzed in psychological frameworks. By applying the key concepts of ekphrasis, grotesque, and affect to the poem, Toikkanen suggests that by problematizing our trust in language and by showing the disappearance of humanity, “The Fear” makes a “turn from an awareness of nature into the suspended horror of … unnaturalness.”

c. Fiction to the Mid-20th Century

Salmela’s “The Grotesque Landscape and the Naturalistic Method,” pp. 187–210 in The Grotesque and the Unnatural, provides a reading of the grotesque in selected texts by Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Jack London. Rather than reading for the thematic of the grotesque, Salmela proposes the notion of “grotesque landscape,” in which human beings are not part of nature but rather incompatible with it and so generate discord. The final section of McTeague is central to his argument: while earlier research has emphasized the human’s entry into nature, Salmela suggests that there is no place for “human visibility” in the narrative, a finding that he supports by an analysis of the closing zoom-out of Erich von Stroheim’s film version of the novel.

Other contributions to the study of the period’s prose fiction come from Denmark. In “Friends, Enemies, Writers: Dos Passos and Hemingway” (AmStScan 42, ii [2010]: 37–55) Clara Juncker outlines how John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway used each other as mirrors, in which they scrutinized, admired, or grimaced at their own abilities and flaws as men and writers. After their famous 1937 breakup in Spain, they saw each other as enemies, monsters. They both lost something other than the friendship of their youth: Dos Passos lost his innocent exuberance, his masculinity, his literary mentor, and his global writing; Hemingway lost empathy and generosity and his protection against excess and despair. In “Virtuoso Variations: Welty’s Unstable Texts and Her Out-takes” (EuWN 3: 116–30) Gretlund focuses on the literary style of Eudora Welty’s stories “Acrobats in the Park” and “No Place for You, My Love” to argue that there are fascinating elements in her impressive mental makeup that are most clearly expressed in...