Gender in Literary Exchange

Can the recovery of women’s contributions to literary culture be compared to a salvage operation? In that case, for what purpose? The essays in this book explore the role of women writers and readers in Nordic literary culture within a European and worldwide network of literary exchange. Specifically, they consider the transnational transmission of women’s literary texts during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Textual exchange is as a migratory practice entailing processes of textual export, import, translation, reception and dissemination across national boundaries.

These essays are case studies that not only explore the various transformations that happen when texts migrate from one cultural and linguistic framework to another, but also highlight the gendered nature of such transformations and the significance of transcultural exchange for perceptions of gender. Spanning from digital humanities and world literature, libraries and reading societies to the transnational reception of authors such as Selma Lagerlöf, Simone de Beauvoir and Monika Fagerholm, the essays contribute to an exciting and expanding field of humanities research.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of NORA--Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research.

Anka Ryall is Professor Emerita in the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. She has published on Virginia Woolf’s border crossings, travel writing and Arctic textual culture. Her latest co-edited book is The Arctic in Literature for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2020).

Anne Birgitte Rønning is Professor of General and Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. Her research includes feminist studies on Scandinavian and European literature, such as questions of gender and genre in historical novels and female Robinsonades, and cultural transfer in Enlightenment books targeted at female readers.