International Scholarship: Nordic Contributions

This section considers contributions from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. This year’s publications show a continued focus on contemporary fiction, with 11 of 15 contributions dealing with 20th- or 21st-century literature. Danish scholars, who were the most prolific during 2013, have written exclusively on this time period. Finnish scholarship is the most varied, featuring publications on poetry and on fiction from the 19th century as well as the 20th and 21st centuries. Norwegian scholarship this year includes an American studies perspective, while the Swedish contribution also exemplifies a contemporary focus but addresses questions of literary pedagogy.

a. 19th-Century Literature

In “Reflections of Home in Nineteenth-Century American Travel Writing of Finland” (Journal of Finnish Studies 16, ii: 5–28) Sirpa Salenius examines a set of travel books by Americans who visited Finland—a grand duchy of Russia at the time—in the 19th century. Since the number of 19th-century American travel narratives dealing with Finland is limited, reflecting its peripheral status, the field is seldom studied, and Salenius’s essay is a welcome addition providing an overview of the topic. In her examination of a variety of travel guides and travel narratives by writers including such American figures as Bayard Taylor and Frances Willard, Salenius suggests that the period’s narratives of Finland often rely on the works and images of earlier writers and tend to project American ideals and values onto Finland and its inhabitants. The essay discusses themes such as the American tendency to emphasize Finland’s separate status from Russia, the role of the tourist gaze in describing the country’s two major cities and other sites, Finnish customs such as the sauna, and the textual rendering of the Finn as “other.” According to Salenius, while some travelers described Finns as Orientals, others such as Taylor found many similarities between rural Finns and American villagers. As is typical of travel writing, in such cases the familiar is evoked to increase the familiarity of the exotic other. Similarly, Willard’s travel writing emphasizes that Finns respect values associated with the Protestant North, emphasized in her finding elements of the traveling American self in the Finnish people encountered. In her conclusion Salenius argues that the positive representations of Finland by American travelers reveal a “need to reconfirm their identity, to praise Americanness,” which could be seen as a way for the new nation to secure its distinct identity.

b. 20th- and 21st-Century Literature

Hans H. Skei’s “‘A Summer of Wistaria’: Old Tales and Talking, Story, and History in Absalom, Absalom!,” pp. 222–39 in Kathryn S. Artuso, ed., Critical Insights: William Faulkner (Salem), provides insight into the difficulties readers endure in interpreting the novel. Skei insists that the reader not dismiss the eyewitness account of Rosa Coldfield, despite its clear unreliability, and points to her memories of a “summer of wistaria” (spelled in the Southern vernacular) as a metaphor both for the difficulty of narrating the South to those not rooted in its traditions and for the problems of sentimentality when narrating history. The smell of wisteria pervades the novel and for Skei marks the “almost impossible distance” between the North and South in understanding each other’s ways of life. To strengthen his argument for emphasizing the role of Miss Rosa, Skei mentions her role as the novel’s first narrator and in concluding the Sutpen mystery, and that she gives impetus to the story by asking Quentin to accompany her on a trip to Sutpen’s Hundred in order to lay the past to rest. Setting this interpretation beside an analysis of Thomas Sutpen’s story as “material for high tragedy,” Skei concludes that it is the storytelling itself in Absalom, Absalom! that enables the novel to represent the burden of history in the South better than any other novel.

Clara Juncker’s “Men of Honor: William Alexander Percy and Ernest Hemingway as Gentleman Soldiers” (Moravian Journal of Literature and Film 4, i: 81–97) traces the connections between two writers who are not usually compared: their times in Paris, their World War...