Work packages

The project is organised in four work packages (WPs) with corresponding workshops. They are closely connected in terms of method, material and topics, inviting cooperation across the WPs.

WP 1: Agents of exchange: Networks, middlemen and translations

Coordinator: Narve Fulsås

New political and legal frameworks altered the international book market and was followed by new infrastructures of agents and publishers. Germany remained the most important foreign market for Norwegian authors, acting as a gateway to other markets, while also representing the most significant rupture: the Nazi take-over in 1933. What kinds of literary strategies and positionings did authors, translators and agents adopt before and after 1933? How did they negotiate the grey areas between collaboration and unflinching anti-fascism, economic interests, censorship and an intricate literary system?

Narve Fulsås maps of the German publishing history of about 30 selected authors served by Moe’s agency ca. 1930–45. They include mainstream names like Olav Duun, Trygve Gulbranssen and Tarjei Vesaas, via today largely forgotten ones like Barbra Ring and Gisken Wildenvey, to members of Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling, Karl Holter and Tore Hamsun. Janke Klok studies the reception of Sigrid Undset in Germany, The Netherlands and Flanders, focusing on the importance of informal, academic, press and business networks and agents contributing to the dissemination.

Norwegian literature depended on translation for an international readership. Applying translation theory or textual criticism could reveal interesting results regarding adaptation or even censorship in new markets. This crucial topic will be addressed by the PhD fellow (supervisor: Giuliano D’Amico) Subjects could include push factors (the economic and literary interest of Norwegian authors and publishers) or pull factors (such as religious or political ideology, nation building, or literature or language policy), translators’ or publisher’s textual adaptations or paratextual framing, translators as part of international networks, or their collaboration with authors or agents.

WP 2: Goods in demand: Nobel laureates and bestsellers

Coordinator: Aina Nøding

The overall topics here are institutions and structures of literary canonization and popularisation. Cases include the international trajectories and patterns of reception of both ‘highbrow’ Nobel laureates Bjørnson, Hamsun and Undset and more ‘lowbrow’ Sven Elvestad and Sigrid Boo. They all illustrate the growing importance of the novel as the main exported genre and the new technological context of audio-visual media: film, radio, and press photos. In addition, children’s literature gained a substantial market abroad, introducing new generations to the often exotic, free-ranging Nordic childhood, pre-Astrid Lindgren.

Tore Rem studies the reception of the Norwegian Nobel laureates, to determine the development of the Prize’s prestige and importance. While Bjørnson was an established author internationally, Hamsun and Undset offer contrasting cases in terms of foreign success (German vs. English), sympathies and domestic literary politics. Klok examines the reception of Undset’s early, controversial contemporary novels in the German-speaking world, The Netherlands and Flanders before and after 1928. Were they substantially re-evaluated, due to ideological shifts following WWI, including the women’s rights movements? Janicke S. Kaasa studies the French-speaking reception of Undset, and Iris Muñiz her Spanish reception, both focusing on the effects of the Nobel Prize.

In terms of translation figures, one author, Johan Bojer, ranks alongside the Nobel laureates in all major languages, offering an alternative success story. His case, studied by Aina Nøding, includes two novels adapted into Hollywood films. Film adaptation was one issue dividing authors, with Undset rejecting offers while writers of crime fiction or ‘chick lit’ like Elvestad or Boo remained popular with foreign readers and film producers alike, from Sweden to the US, including Walt Disney. Eirik Frisvold Hanssen maps the extent, form and impact of foreign film, broadcasting and photography on literary export and success. Children’s literature provides yet another field of circulation and reception. Theexport of numerous titles and critical acclaim of Hans Aanrud, Marie Hamsun, Andreas Haukland, Gabriel Scott and others is little known and the topic of Nøding’s second case study. Three MA scholarships will be offered in children’s literature, film/photo/broadcasting and/or the Nobel Prize reception.

WP 3: Empires of Books: Religion, politics, and book trade

Coordinator: Giuliano D’Amico

WP 3 traces the paths of Norwegian works abroad through the interconnected aspects of religion, politics, and translation, emphasising the increasing Anglo-American dominance globally. Simon Frost will study cases of local and transatlantic receptions of Norwegian literature centring on English port towns as gateways to Anglo-US empires of finance, culture, and power.

Undset is a key figure of transatlantic and global reception. Before 1950 her works had been translated into 26 languages and published in 32 countries/territories on 4 continents. How had a writer of novels set in mediaeval Norway acquired this position? Was there a difference in her reception along religious or political lines? Furthermore, Undset opens investigations into the gendered dimensions of literary struggles, receptions, and possibilities of action.

Kaasa studies Undset’s production and long-term positive US reception, exposing this underexplored part of Undset’s role in the global literary market. Nøding and Rem aim to unravel the negotiations, strategies and responses involved in the rise and later oblivion of the anglophile Undset in the UK and the British Empire. Klok studies how religious opposition to Undset’s early novels in The Netherlands resulted in censorship and asks if these attitudes changed following her Catholic conversion and Nobel Prize. D’Amico investigates Undset’s transnational reception in Catholic countries and milieus, from ‘core’ and ‘semi-peripheral’ European countries where Undset was first translated, to the later reception in emerging Catholic literary areas such as Latin America and the US. Further aspects of the international Undset reception will be the topic of an MA thesis.

WP 4: Norwegian World Literature: perspectives for future research

Coordinator: Janicke S. Kaasa

MAP aims to develop and advance theoretical and methodological approaches related to world literature, book history, reception, and translation studies. This WP, in the form of an international conference, opens for in-debt theoretical and methodological discussions across disciplines and backgrounds. A volume of selected papers will be published in the series Studies on Cultural Transfer & Transmission (Groningen; eds. Nøding and Kaasa). It will present relevant case studies, while emphasising the theoretical and methodological implications, limitations, and possibilities of global perspectives on Norwegian literature specifically, and small-language literatures generally with particular emphasis on Scandinavia.