Volume 50, Issue 1

Karen Blixen’s works are characterized by a plurality of intertextual references. The article wants to explore in-depth a specific facet, the reference function of names in one of Blixen’s Winter’s Tales , “Alkmene”. Besides the well-known mythological references, evidence shows a pronounced dialogue of Blixen’s text with works of St. St. Blicher, Shakespeare and Goethe. Most previous interest concentrated on mythological and explicitly referenced names whereas e. g. the affinity in the relation between Blixen’s Alkmene and Vilhelm and the corresponding relation between Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and Mignon has gone unnoticed. The intertexts are not only communicating with Blixen’s “Alkmene”, but constitute a common resonating cavity in which some themes are taken up in almost all of the texts.

The Book of the Wild Rose is Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s (1793–1866) masterpiece. The two different editions of this ”book” cover most of his literary career, from the early 1830’s to his hasty departure from Sweden in 1851. The elaborate use of a frame fiction, which confers a self-reflecting metafictional quality to the whole, allows the author to collect a large part of his writings. The fascinating and elusive personality of Almqvist as a writer seems to vanish behind the extreme variety and richness of his work. My aim is to present a reading inspired by the literary discourse analysis of French pragmatic linguist Dominique Maingueneau, which focuses on the frame fiction in The Book of the Wild Rose in order to show the presence of the author facing the reader in different ways in the text.

Ibsen’s Peer Gynt holds a unique position in Norwegian culture as a ‘national epic’ that simultaneously satirizes the idea of coherent national and individual identities. This article analyzes the dramatic text’s recent adaptation into a graphic novel, published in Norway in 2014. We argue that this adaptation indicates which aspects of the play seem relevant to modern Norwegian readers. Through close, comparative readings of two key scenes in Ibsen’s text and in the adaptation, we show how the many metaliterary aspects of the former are creatively and irreverently treated in the latter. Moreover, we argue that one of the most striking aspects of Peer Gynt , the graphic novel, is its depiction of postmodern, performative identities, and the ‘liquidity’ of modern Western individuals.

Tom Kristensen’s travel book En Kavaler i Spanien (1926) was the result of a stay at the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen’s house, where Kristensen not only met his physical and psychological superior, he also began his artistic development and personal breakdown towards the novel Hærværk (1930). The article argues that with a departure from this context, En Kavaler i Spanien can be read as an original and complex subgenre of the sentimental novel and it suggests that the work might best be categorized as ‘hard sentimentalism’. This subgenre of the travel novel can be identified in the intertwinement of the core thematic of the book — eroticism, medieval Spain and identity loss — with style and form. The paradoxical generic notion of ‘hard sentimentalism’ is used to connect medieval Spain with the erotic, but in an increasingly dangerous way, which threatens the traveler’s identity by increasing homosexual attraction and opening an abyss of degeneration and distorted emptiness behind the flirt.

This paper explores the historical background and application of the concept halvemål in Norwegian linguistics, with particular regard to the disciplines of dialectology and onomasiology. The concept occurs in numerous studies and serves as an apt illustration of how a folk notion may evolve into a recognized scientific term. The paper gives a detailed account of the employment of the term, and shows that its signification differs noticeably in different scholarly contexts. The study further indicates that the concept has been considered “quasi-scientific” by several scholars, possibly because of its background as a lay explanation.

In the second half of the 18th century and early 19th century, a rising interest in Old Norse literature outside the Nordic countries could be noted that, to a great deal, focused on the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda as sources for Norse mythology. This interest is also reflected in the works of the Polish historian Joachim Lelewel (1786–1861) who, in 1807 and 1828, published translations and retellings of the Poetic and the Prose Edda . These were based on French, German and Latin translations. The second edition of 1828 is characterised by a more comprehensive section with eddic poetry, the selection of which is also explained by Lelewel, as well as an essay on pre-Christian religion that also includes a research overview and a list of editions/translations of the Eddas .

The aim of the research is to investigate how Polish learners of Swedish acquire the category of definiteness narrowed to the so-called indirect anaphors: definite noun phrases without any explicit antecedent, staying in a relation with a kind of “trigger”, an element in the text that is crucial for their interpretation. Previous publications about acquisition of definiteness in Swedish focus on the morphological development rather than the development regarding the choice of form. In my longitudinal study of students of Swedish at the Department of Scandinavian Studies at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, I analyse students’ grammar tests and essays with regard to this issue. With Schwarz’s classification of anaphors as a working basis a model for a learning route is developed, covering semantic, conceptual and inferential type of anaphors.

This paper investigates first language (L1) influence on the acquisition of syntax and discourse pragmatics in a second language (L2) in essays written by advanced learners of German from Sweden, China and Belarus (the KobaltDaF Corpus). The control corpus consists of essays written by native German speakers. The study focuses on the clause-initial preverbal position of V2 declaratives, the so-called prefield (Vorfeld) and the Vor-Vorfeld. The results show that the language-specific information structural patterns that exist in the L1 have an impact on the L2. The forms and frequencies of prefield constituent types differ substantially from the target language, indicating transfer in a domain other than pure syntax. The learners start their sentences in a nonnative way. Even though Swedish and German are closely related languages, the results show, contrary to what is expected, that Chinese learners produce patterns that are more targetlike. In addition, implications of these findings for language teaching are discussed.

The aim of this article is to analyze the attitudes of two prominent Swedish working-class poets – Stig Sjödin (1917–1993) and Jenny Wrangborg (born 1984) – toward the social-democratic welfare state. The premise of the analysis is that this welfare state is a historical and changing phenomenon that has attracted attention from working-class writers in different ways at different times. Sjödin wrote during the emergence and the heyday of the social-democratic welfare state, whereas Wrangborg is writing poetry at a time when the labour movement is ailing and the welfare state challenged. Thus, despite the two poets having closely aligned aesthetical and ideological ideals, their attitudes toward the welfare state are distinctly different.

This article analyses literary approaches to the relation between the folkhem , the Swedish welfare state, and the miljonprogram (a public housing program between 1965 and 1974 implemented by the social democratic government with the aim to build 1 million homes to solve the housing shortage). Since its initiation, this housing program has been subjected to critique addressing, among others, issues with quality and the promotion of segregation and social exclusion. Literary discussions since the mid-1960s have both responded to this critique and challenged it. They have questioned the impact of welfare politics on a still divided society by drawing on negative aspects of miljonprogram -areas. Recent texts that negotiate class and ethnicity, however, reclaim these areas with positive descriptions. They highlight their meaning as homes for a large part of Swedish contemporary society and thereby re-connect to the original idea of the folkhem – a home for the people.