Comparative Approaches to Nordic and European Modernisms

Book excerpt: Modernism is a truly international movement that cuts across many boundaries - territorial, political, cultural, and linguistic. Its geographical and temporal scope make it one of the most prominent fields of literary study. The essays in this book compare Modernist features of the Nordic literatures with the modernizing works and movements of the rest of twentieth-century Europe. The contributors situate the concept of Modernism in a pan-European context, and discuss how a range of texts respond to, and thus represent, facets of European Modernism at widely different moments - not least in the period following the second world war. In addition to studies of individual Nordic authors, the aspects of Modernism explored here include its response to war, the relationship between verbal and pictorial art, and Modernisms impact on later Nordic and European writers