"The miss Austen of Sweden"

Om Fredrika Bremer i 1840-talets USA och litteraturhistorisk omvärdering

Abstract

”The Miss Austen of Sweden”. Fredrika Bremer in the 1840s America and Historiographical Revaluation

How did Fredrika Bremer’s (1801–1865) depictions of Scandinavian family life become so immensely popular in the United States in the 1840s, and what did this transatlantic success have to do with gender, translation, media history, and nation building? In an attempt to trace the prerequisites for the intense yet rather short lived American ”Bremer-mania”, this article focuses on the period 1842 to 1844 – a task greatly facilitated by the last decades’ substantial
digitizing of book collections and historical press material. The investigation shows that Bremer’s breakthrough occurred in a very specific situation in American social-, cultural-, and media history, and that her novels filled certain needs in the ongoing postcolonial struggle to foil British cultural hegemony. In this process, Bremer’s depictions of young women fighting for freedom offered a transfer identity, a position that for obvious reasons was provisional and temporary. As publishers started to invest in local writers, the boom for Scandinavian fiction soon decreased, and has left few traces in the history of the 19th century American novel. Fredrika Bremer’s American career is yet another example of how translated literature and international dissemination is  inadequately reflected in national literary historiography. However, considering the last decades’ growing focus on transcultural dissemination, it is eligible that future research pays more attention to the diversity of literary flows and circulations.