Volume 48, Issue 1

Recent methodological and technological developments greatly facilitate the use of stylometry for authorship attribution. Burrows’ delta method, proposed in 2002, has been shown to yield good results for a variety of corpora in different languages. The present article demonstrates that this method is highly effective in analysing 19th century Icelandic fiction. The method is then applied to the classical question of the stylistic affinity between two 13th century texts: Heimskringla and Egils saga. Heimskringla proves to be more similar to Egils saga than it is to a variety of contemporary texts, including other kings’ sagas. This supports the theory that the two texts have the same author.

The main aim of the article is to offer a closer examination of interfaces between Johnson’s factual and fictional modes of writing around 1930, with a particular emphasis on analysing accounts and appreciations of modern environments, infrastructures and mentalities in “peripheral” as well as “central” Swedish locations. To frame theoretically this examination, the article opens by considering some aspects of the current scholarly discourses on the hybrid genre of travel writing, to which the nonfictional texts in question broadly belong, and on the interrelationship between factual and fictional modes of representation. The article goes on to consider three of Johnson’s newspaper reportage pieces that may be located in the subgenre of domestic travel writing, popular in the interwar period, while they also, as “foreign” correspondence of sorts, contribute to confounding the very concept of home nation as well as challenging the distinction between “off-centre” and “centre” in the nation space. In its third phase, the article discusses two novels that illustrate, respectively, the “marginal” and the metropolitan variant of domestic modernism in Johnson’s fictional work, thus complementing the reportage pieces. The article concludes by situating the discussion of Johnson’s narratives in the context of new approaches to Scandinavian literary modernism.

One of Lars Gustafsson’s closest friends among writers in the German language was Max Frisch, whose work Gustafsson admired. In this comparative reading of Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (1979) and Gustafsson’s En kakelsättares eftermiddag (1991) the latter is examined as an elaborated response to Frisch’s text. The influence of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy on Frisch’s Stiller (1954), Homo faber (1957) and Mein Name sei Gantenbein (1964) has been explored in previous scholarship. In the following reading of Frisch’s novel, Heidegger’s Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes is also pointed out as an influence. This influence on Frisch’s text is also one of the subjects of the response we find in Gustafsson’s novel. Thus, in the concluding segment of this article Heidegger’s essay is a key text when understanding how Frisch’s novel is absorbed into Gustafsson’s.

For the first time Klaus Rifbjerg’s diary Berlinerdage (1995) and other of his most important prose and lyric texts from different periods of his authorship are examined in the context of Marc Augé’s theory of places and non-places in this paper. The analysis of Rifbjerg’s texts focuses on the implicit presence of places and non-places. Reading Rifbjerg in context of Augé and Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert (final version 1938) opens up for a new research position; it proves Rifbjerg’s considerable interest in German culture, and elucidates his opposition to ‘supermodernity’. Places and non-places are palimpsests in Rifbjerg’s texts about Berlin’s and Copenhagen’s urbanity. His texts focus on cultural continuity and historical foundation of modern life.

Based on a comparative analysis of Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s three novels Ett öga rött (2003), Montecore, en unik tiger (2006), and Allt jag inte minns (2015), this article explores the significance of memories and forgetting to the development of both individual and collective identity. More specifically, the article discusses which narrative devices Khemiri employs in showing how the identities of the novels’ protagonists are influenced by memories and forgetting, and deliberates what the implications of Khemiri’s novels may be, for our understanding of individual as well as collective identity in today’s culturally diverse Scandinavian societies.