Volume 55, Issue 1 - Partial Special Issue: The Bricks of Fiction. Architecture and Scandinavian Literature

This thematic section titled The Bricks of Fiction. Architecture and Scandinavian Literature brings together five international scholars of Scandinavian studies. Stemming from an interdisciplinary research project titled Pappershus, luftslott, ordsmedjor. Arkitektur i nordiska språk och nordisk litteratur conceived by Andrea Meregalli and Camilla Storskog at the University of Milan, Italy, the five articles presented by Aldona Zańko, Massimo Ciaravolo, Luca Gendolavigna, Andrea Romanzi, and Joanna Cymbrykiewic explore the design, patterns, and structures of fiction, and analyse the role and function of architectural elements in two nineteenth-century classics — H.C. Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard — and in the work of contemporary Scandinavian writers such as Jan Roar Leikvoll, Maria Gerhardt, Zulmir Bečević, Thomas Engström and Margit Richert.

The representation of contemporary Copenhagen in Kierkegaard’s Forførerens Dagbog (The Seducer’s Diary) (1843) makes the city a subject of the novel, not just the setting. It encompasses urban space and architecture, as well as the natural environment in and around the Danish capital. The novel, part of the larger unit called Enten – Eller (Either/Or), is the last in a series of texts that the fictional editor Victor Eremita attributes to A, the aesthetic man, before the second part begins, in which B, the ethical man, replies to A. This article attempts to analyse Forførerens Dagbog as an urban novel in relation to the myth of Don Juan, to the emergence of the flâneur in Paris, to the rise of the novel as a genre, and to the configuration of space and time in this novel. The aim is to connect these threads and shed some new light on a masterpiece of 19th-century Scandinavian literature.

The article explores the issue of the places of illness in Maria Gerhardt’s two works Der bor Hollywoodstjerner på vejen (2014) and Transfervindue (2017). Through these works, the Danish author shares her personal story of struggling with breast cancer, offering a unique perspective as a cancer patient. The present article focuses on two such places in Gerhardt’s narratives: the hospital, a real setting, and the hospice, a fictional one. Drawing on the concepts of Marc Augé’s non-places and Michel Foucault’s heterotopias/utopias, the article examines these places. Specifically, it investigates whether the two places in question may be perceived as non-places and heterotopias, and how they may contribute to the protagonist’s alienation and exclusion from the society of the healthy (i.e., the norm).

In recent decades, dystopia has become an increasingly popular genre by depicting future scenarios where issues related to climate, crime, migration, and welfare are taken to extremes (Trotta and Sadri 2020. “Welcome to the Beginning of the End of Everything.” In Broken Mirrors. Representations of Apocalypses and Dystopias in Popular Culture , edited by Joe Trotta, Zlatan Filipovic, and Houman Sadri, 1–14. New York: Routledge, 2). Such aspects feature Swedish novels such as Avblattefieringsprocessen (2014) by Zulmir Bečević, and Nattavaara (2020) by Thomas Engström and Margit Richert (first volume of the Nordmark trilogy), where semi-totalitarian governments implement drastic measures to prevent ethno-cultural and political issues in a fragmented, and profoundly transformed Sweden. Focusing on architectures (and the legislative apparatus enabling their existence), this study aims to analyse spaces such as internment camps and militarised cities in order to understand the link established between architecture and power. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16 (1): 22–7) against the backdrop of a theoretical approach to dystopia as an ‘extrapolative’ dimension (Seeger and Davison-Vecchione 2019. “Dystopian Literature and the Sociological Imagination.” Thesis Eleven 1 (155): 45–63), this article sets out to critically frame architectures and laws of a literary Sweden which is increasingly narrated as a dehumanised securocracy.

Jan Roar Leikvoll’s (1974–2014) novels, set in dystopian, indeterminate worlds, portray captivity, physical, psychological, and socially imposed. This article argues that while the architectural cages featured in these stories (such as walled cities and cloistered monasteries) are significant, it is the body itself that emerges as the central point of confinement. Drawing on biographical criticism, affective narratology, and insights from narrative medicine, the study reveals how Leikvoll’s confrontation with illness intensifies his representations of bodily entrapment, shaping the darkness that characterizes his fictional landscapes. Through a close reading of motifs such as decay, gender constraints, and enforced isolation, Leikvoll’s works are shown to function both as explorations of embodied vulnerability and as critiques of societal norms that reinforce exclusion and control. The interdisciplinary approach highlights how Leikvoll’s distinctive style combines personal affliction with broader cultural anxieties, ultimately highlighting the fragile link between physical being, identity, and power.

The paper proposed investigates a selection of contemporary feminist reworkings of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Little Mermaid (1837), where the common objective is to transform the key component of the original storyline: the ending. One of the hallmarks of the fairy tale genre is the joy of the happy ending, which not only encloses the narrative but also reinforces its moral. In its original version, the story picturing the little mermaid’s struggles does not, however, end fully well, leaving the protagonist in a sort of purgatory with no prince and only the hope of gaining a soul. While exploring the reworked ending scenarios, the article seeks to determine how they reflect the changing principles of feminist thought and how this relationship affects their position towards the original.

In the ruin of the Cistercian monastery in Eldena near Greifswald, there is a runic inscription on a brick in a wall: þiri X . The present article offers interpretation proposals for a number of questions: When, in which social and contact linguistic context, in which tradition was the inscription carved? With what kind of writing system in which language was it carved? Who carved it with which tools, and with what intention? What does the inscription say, and who might have read it and with what effect?

The 1836 painting Langebro, Copenhagen, in the Moonlight with Running Figures by C.W. Eckersberg provides a rare glimpse of Golden Age Copenhagen by night – a strangely compelling nocturnal scene, at once mysterious and commonplace. The bridge – an important topographical feature of Copenhagen – is depicted in the painting as both connecting and disconnecting places and people in the city. This article considers Langebro as an unsettling place in early nineteenth-century Copenhagen as well as today, one that is simultaneously central and peripheral to the city, a place and non-place that evokes sentiments of the uncanny. As an ambiguous topos, Langebro sparked the imaginations not only of Golden Age painters such as Eckersberg but also of writers such as Søren Kierkegaard and H.C. Andersen, whose representations of Copenhagen will be interpreted in this light.

This article applies Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope in a reading of two recent Danish novels that relate to the planet’s transition into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The analysis of Charlotte Weitze’s Den afskyelige and Christian Byskov’s Græsset shows that, while the central chronotopical motifs in these novels differ considerably, the minor chronotopes combine in both works to form a major chronotope that is constituted by an experience of time passing at a pace beyond human control, connected to places that lack stability and permanence. However, in both texts, this experience is accompanied by recourse to the older chronotope of the idyll through retrospection into a pre-Anthropocenic past that was allegedly characterized by cyclical, slow, or stagnant time and by stable, unchanging places.

This corpus-based study addresses evaluative morphology in Swedish. It focusses on constructions with four quantifying intensifying adjectives ( små - ‘small’, stor - ‘big’, halv - ‘half’, and hel - ‘whole’) combined with a verbal base (e.g., halvspringa ‘half-run’). The aim is to explore the evaluative meanings of these constructions in different genres and types of data (fiction, news, social media, dictionaries) as well as the potential competition with constructions involving neoclassical prefixes (e.g., mini -, mega -, mikro -, semi -) and with syntactic phrases including one of the adjectives as an adverbial plus a present participle. The study suggests that evaluative constructions with a verbal base are established and productive word-formation patterns in Swedish, preferably including native adjectives (as prefixoids), rather than neoclassical prefixes. In parallel, there are also syntactic means to express evaluation, whose use partly seems to vary depending on the adjectives involved.

This article analyses non-finite verbal structures with verbs of perception in Danish-Norwegian language in Ludvig Holberg’s writings. Holberg is considered the last representative of a distinctly Latinizing style in Denmark-Norway. The article analyses the three constructions accusative with present participle (AcP) and accusative with infinitive (AcI) with and without infinitive marker. It will be shown that there are syntactic and semantic differences between them, but also differences in level of usage. There are also differences between the literary genres when it comes to the use of the various constructions.