Benjamin August Barkved

The Coastal Town as a Topos in the Norwegian Novel of the Late 19th Century

In my Ph.D project, I depart from the observation that a significant proportion of the authors we associate with the Modern Breakthrough in Norway (Bjørnson, Ibsen, Kielland, Lie, Skram, Garborg), seem to make use of the coast town, and other communities along the Norwegian coast, as literary settings.

Few literary scholars have commented on why this particular spatial object gains influence. This leads me to ask: Who took part and helped shape the literary-geographical imaginary of the coast-town? Was it shaped also by non-canonized, ‘forgotten’ authors? Is there a special connection between ideology and form on the one hand, and the figure of the coast-town on the other? So it seems, as the authors who wrote about the coast town are heavily associated with the emergence of realism in Norway, and with the program of social critique and debate that Danish critic Georg Brandes demanded of the ‘new’, ‘modern’ Nordic literature.

I combine a quantitative, ‘distant reading’ with two traditional close readings. In the distant reading, I build a ‘literary corpus of the coast’, based on geographically categorized words, resulting in some 46 000 entries. As such, I can find out the size of the literary investments in different coastal communities (the coast town, the fjord village, etc.), the degree of canonization, and historical trendlines (‘when’ was the literary coast town produced). I also use NER-algorithms to quantify and categorize the literary spatiality of single texts.

In the close readings, I focus on the authors Alexander Kielland and Jonas Lie. I combine methods from literary geography and narratology to uncover in detail the spatial make-up of the literary coast town. Here I pay attention to the international aspect, exploring the coast town as a site of outwards-looking, cosmopolitan identities. Connections to the old Hanseatic trade geographies and the Baltic Sea, as well as to the Mediterranean and the Americas, are just as, if not more, emphasised than connections to the country, to Norway.

• “Støy, snylting og parasittiske relasjoner hos Melville,” [Book Review] Anders M. Gullestad. Melvillean Parasites. Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2022, Norsk Litteraturvitenskapelig Tidsskrift 21,1 (2024): 63-68. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18261/nlvt.27.1.8.

• “Kielland og den litterære kystbyen [Kielland and the literary coast town],” lecture at Sølvberget bibliotek og kulturhus, Kapittelfestivalen, Stavanger, September 18-22, 2024.
• Paper presentation at the PhD and Research Seminar Ending, closing, quitting/stopping…and continuing. Aesthetic, artistic, and literary practices of finalization, organised by Text, Image, Sound, Space (TBLR) – Norwegian Researcher Training School, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, May 22-24, 2024.
• “A Bird’s Eye View on Coastal Literary Space. Text-mining Approaches to Space, Place and Topos in 19th century Norwegian literature,” annual conference of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study SASS 2024, Seattle, May 9-11, 2024.
• “Sensing the Coastal Town from Afar: Conveying a Maritime Sense of Place in Alexander Kielland’s ‘Skipper Worse’ (1882),” NSAE – Nordic Society of Aesthetics Annual Conference Aesthetics and the Body, Centre Universitaire de Norvège à Paris, June 1-2, 2023.
• Participation in the Authoritative Texts and Their Receptions (ATTR) Research School’s Spring Seminar on Digital Humanities, Athens, March 13-17, 2023.