Romantic Norths

Anglo-Nordic Exchanges, 1770-1842

Cian Duffy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319512457
• eBook ISBN: 9783319512464
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores various forms of cultural influence and exchange between Britain and the Nordic countries in the late eighteenth century and romantic period. Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, these essays not only constitute a substantial and innovative contribution to scholarly understanding of the development of romanticisms and romantic nationalisms in Britain and the Nordic countries, but also describe a pattern of cultural encounter which was predicated upon exchange and a sense of commonality rather than upon the perception of difference or alterity which has so often been discerned by critical descriptions of British romantic-period engagements with non-British cultures. The volume ought to appeal to a broad and genuinely international academic audience with interests in eighteenth-century and romantic-period culture in Britain and Scandinavia as well as to undergraduates taking courses in eighteenth-century, romantic, and Scandinavian studies.

Table of contents

• Romantic Norths
• Introduction: ‘the less known, but equally romantic, regions of the north’
• ‘Imaginary circles round the human mind’: Bias and Openness in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)
• British Travellers Visiting Finland: from ‘Enlightened’ Expectations to ‘Romantic’ Fulfilment
• Constructing and Classifying ‘the North’: Linnaeus and Lapland
• Inventing Jutland for the ‘Golden Age’: Danish Artists Guided by Sir Walter Scott
• ‘They dance all under the greenwood tree’: British and Danish Romantic-Period Adaptations of Two Danish ‘Elf Ballads’
• ‘The North’ and ‘the East’: The Odin Migration Theory
• ‘These children of nature’: Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Danish Imaginings of Greenland
• Locating Norway in ‘the North’: the Cultural Geography of Norway in Strickland’s ‘Arthur Ridley; or, a Voyage to Norway’ (1826) and Andersen’s ‘Elverhøi’ (1845)
• A ‘remote and cheerless possession’: Early Nineteenth-Century British Imaginings of Newfoundland
• Coda: Comparing the Literature of ‘the North’ – William Wordsworth and Jens Baggesen
• Bibliography
• Index