Description
This book explores various forms of cultural influence and exchange between Britain and the Nordic countries in the late eighteenth century and romantic period. Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, these essays not only constitute a substantial and innovative contribution to scholarly understanding of the development of romanticisms and romantic nationalisms in Britain and the Nordic countries, but also describe a pattern of cultural encounter which was predicated upon exchange and a sense of commonality rather than upon the perception of difference or alterity which has so often been discerned by critical descriptions of British romantic-period engagements with non-British cultures. The volume ought to appeal to a broad and genuinely international academic audience with interests in eighteenth-century and romantic-period culture in Britain and Scandinavia aswell as to undergraduates taking courses in eighteenth-century, romantic, and Scandinavian studies.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. 'Imaginary circles round the human mind’: bias and openness in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) - Christoph Bode.- Chapter 3. From ‘enlightened’ expectations to ‘romantic’ fulfilment: British travellers visiting Finland - Leena Eilittä.- Chapter 4. Constructing and classifying ‘the North’: Linnaeus in Lapland - Annika Lindskog.- Chapter 5. Inventing Jutland for the ‘Golden Age’: Danish artists guided by Sir Walter Scott - Gertrud Oelsner.- Chapter 6. ‘The dance all under the greenwood tree’: British and Danish romantic-period adaptations of two Danish ‘elf ballads’ - Lis Møller.- Chapter 7. ‘The North’ and ‘the East’: the Odin migration theory in the eighteenth century and romantic periods - Robert Rix.- Chapter 8. ‘These children of nature’: cultural exchange in nineteenth-century Danish imaginings of Greenland - LoneKølle Martinsen.- Chapter 9. Locating Norway in ‘the North’: the cultural geography of Norway in Strickland’s ‘Arthur Ridley; or A Voyage to Norway’ (1826) and Andersen’s ‘Elverhøi’ (1845) - Elettra Carbone.- Chapter 10. A ‘remote and cheerless possession’: early nineteenth-century British imaginings of Newfoundland - Pam Perkins.- Chapter 11. Coda: Comparing the literature of ‘the North’: William Wordsworth and Jens Baggesen - Cian Duffy.- Bibliography.-
