This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This module examines literary works ranging from folk tales and sagas through the respective periods of national Romanticism to the present day written in the principal Nordic languages (Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish), and will also explore some films from the region. The texts will be studied in English translations, and the films will be in the original language with English subtitles. Some of the themes to be extracted from these texts and explored in more detail include Romanticism, exile, nationalism and post-nationalism, world literatures, translation and adaptation. Nordic crime fiction and its adaptations as TV dramas and films will also be examined, exploring reasons for the genre's popularity (both within and beyond the region). The module will investigate how Nordic literature and film have developed diachronically, how the literatures of the various Nordic countries interact and interrelate, and how contemporary texts are rewriting and renegotiating the historical linguistic, geographic, ethnic and cultural borders of the region.
Total contact hours: 20
Essay 1 (1,500 words) – 40%
Essay 2 (2,000 words) – 60%
Indicative Reading List
Høeg, P. (1996). Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, London: Vintage
Hamsun, K. (2000). Hunger, London: Dover Publications
Ibsen, H. (2013). A Doll's House, London: Methuen
The Kalevala (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2008)
Moberg, V. (1995). The Last Letter Home (Emigrant Novels), Minnesota Historical Society Press
Rossel, S.H. (1981). A History of Scandinavian Literature, 1870-1980, University of Minnesota Press
Sture Ureland, P. and Ian Clarkson, (2009). Scandinavian Language Contracts, Cambridge: CUP
Films and TV Dramas:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor) Dir. Niels Arden Oplev
The Killing (Forbrydelsen) Dir. Søren Sveistrup
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
On successfully completing the module students will be able to:
Demonstrate systematic knowledge and critical understanding of some major texts of the Nordic tradition, from the Norse sagas through the period of National Romanticisms up to the present day (including film and drama);
Demonstrate an understanding of the cultural, literary, regional/national, and historical contexts of these works. In addition, students will be able to show appreciation of the ways in which the different traditions of the Nordic countries inter-relate within these contexts;
Exhibit the analytical skills required to critically assess, evaluate and explain the distinctive literary features of Nordic literature with reference to the above listed contexts;
Critically analyse questions pertaining to form, style and structure explored by these texts;
Evaluate how traditional forms of Nordic literature compare and contrast with contemporary writing from the region; that is, students will be able to demonstrate an ability to apply critical and theoretical frameworks in contexts other than those in which they were first encountered.
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