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.
Further reading
The project is affiliated with the NTNU-based project ImagiNation 1814-1905: Mapping the Imagined Geographies of Norway.