Nordic Utopias and Dystopias
From Aniara to Allatta!
The Nordic countries have long been subject to certain idealised, even utopian imaginaries, particularly with regard to images of pristine nature and the societal ideals of democracy, equality and education. On the other hand, such projections inevitably invite dissent, irony and intimations of the utopia’s dark underside. Things may yet take, or may have already taken, a dystopic course. The present volume offers twelve contributions on utopias and dystopias in Nordic literature and culture. Geographically, the articles cover the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, as well as the autonomous area of Greenland. Through the articles’ varied subjects — ranging from avant-garde literature and long poems to noir TV-series, young adult fiction, popular historiography, and political discourse in literature outside of Norden — the volume brings forth a historically rich, multi-layered picture of social, cultural and environmental imagination in the Nordic countries. Nordic Utopias and Dystopias is thus of interest not only to specialists in dystopian and utopian research but more broadly to scholars of literature and culture, and the political and social sciences, especially but not exclusively in the Nordic context.
[FILLM Studies in Languages and Literatures, 17] 2022. ix, 256 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
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Series editor’s preface | pp. ix–x
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IntroductionPia Ahlbäck, Jouni Teittinen and Maria Lassén-Seger | pp. 1–13
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Part 1. Nordic welfare state utopianism
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From Niels Klim to Björk’s Utopia: Some historical and present trajectories of utopia and dystopia in the Nordic traditionNicole Pohl | pp. 17–34
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Crisis after utopia: Intellectuals, academics and the Scandinavian debate on utopia at the turn of the 1980s: The case of the Swedish magazine KRISLuc Lefebvre | pp. 35–54
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Utopianism reinstated: The fall and rise of a society in Benni Bødker's Zombie CityPeter Kostenniemi | pp. 55–72
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An ethnographic account of the Nordic utopia in ScotlandLaila Berg | pp. 73–90
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Part 2. Nature in transformation
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Creeping into the present: Iida Rauma’s Seksistä ja matematiikasta as eco-dystopian realismJuha Raipola | pp. 93–110
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Snowy State: The Children’s History of SwedenBjörn Sundmark | pp. 111–130
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Frozen futures or tropical Greenland? Climate change arctopias in Cold Earth and Allatta! 2040Johannes Riquet | pp. 131–152
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Children of the district: Pastoral and the welfare state in Monika Fagerholm’s The End of the Glitter Scene novelsTeemu Jokilaakso | pp. 153–178
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Part 3. Confronting dystopian futures
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Harry Martinson’s Aniara as a Menippean satire for the AnthropoceneDaniel Ogden | pp. 181–196
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Who is in power, you say? Two young adult dystopias from modern day ScandinaviaØygunn Skodvin Prestegård | pp. 197–212
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Remembering in the age of global warming: Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water as ecological trauma fictionRiitta Jytilä | pp. 213–228
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Space for love or arts of living on a damaged planet: Dystopia and utopia in novels by Karin Boye, Johanna Nilsson and Johanna SinisaloJudith Meurer-Bongardt | pp. 229–252
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Index | pp. 253–256
Subjects
Literature & Literary Studies
Main BIC Subject
DSB: Literary studies: general
Main BISAC Subject
LIT006000: LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory