Journeys from Scandinavia

For all of the scholarship done on postcolonial literatures, little has been applied to Scandinavian writing. Yet, beginning with the onset of tourism beyond Scandinavia in the 1840s, a compelling body of prose works documents Scandinavian attitudes toward foreign countries and further shows how these Scandinavian travelers sought to portray themselves to uncharted cultures.

 

Focusing on Danish and Norwegian travelogues, Elisabeth Oxfeldt traces the evolution of Scandinavian travel writing over two centuries using pivotal texts from each era, including works by Hans Christian Andersen, Knut Hamsun, and Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen). Oxfeldt situates each one in its historical and geopolitical context, and her close readings delineate how each travelogue reflects Scandinavia’s ongoing confrontation between Self and the non-European cultural Other.

 

A long-overdue examination of travel literature produced by some of Denmark and Norway’s greatest writers, Journeys from Scandinavia unpacks the unstable constructions of Scandinavian cultural and national identity and, in doing so, complicates the common assumption of a homogeneous, hegemonic Scandinavia.

Introduction, Part I. Romantic Journeys to the Orient, 1. Discovering His Inner Turk: Hans Christian Andersen’s Commodification of the Exotic, 2. The Hyphenated Woman: Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann’s Juggling Categories of Gender, Nation, and Ethnicity, 3. The Ironic Traveler: Danger and Identity in Knut Hamsun’s Oriental Travelogues, Part II. Modern Primitive Travel, 4. Savage Science: Johannes V. Jensen in the Malay Jungle, 5. Humor, Gender, and Nationality: Issak Dinesen’s Encounter with Africa, 6. The Traveler and the Tourist: Axel Jensen’s Desperate Frolic in the Sahara, Part III. Late and Postmodern Travel, 7. From the Personal to the Universal–and Back: Carsten Jensen Around the World, 8. Futile Journeys: Parody, Postmodernism, and Postnationalism in Erlend Loe’s Traveling, Conclusion, Notes, Bibliography, Index