Nature in Service of the Nation

Is it possible to explore how literature shapes national conceptions of nature? My PhD project arises from this question, and will combine literature geography, cultural memory studies, and digital humanities to examine how nature is constructed in the literature of Norway from 1814 to 1871. How are different nature types valued as regard to nation building – be it as an economic, or symbolic, asset? Which nature types received particular attention in the period, and what access does literature provide us in understanding and evaluating them? What changes and trends can we observe over time? Are there any lasting, shared representations of nature that we might call national, and can we trace their origins in the literature of this period?

As part of the research group ImagiNation I’m working with the digitized data from the National Library of Norway, and using digital humanities to track larger trends in the material. The research group is trying to get an image of how the Norwegian geographies are resented and imagined in the period from our constitution in 1814 to the dissolution of the union with Sweden in 1905.

My PhD project has two primary goals:

1. To offer new insights into the literature from 1814-1871 by focusing on its negotiation of the nature types as “mountain,” “fjord,” and  “forest”.
2. To examine how imagined nature is shaped and communicated in literary texts and how cultural representations contribute to shaping our perceptions of nature’s value.

Further reading