Svensk 1800-talslitteratur i världen

Det kvinnliga romanundret

Abstract

Swedish Literature as World Literature in the Nineteenth Century. Top Selling Novels by Women Writers

So far, Swedish literary history has been the construction of a nation’s cultural heritage based on certain authorships. This most certainly was the case when the history of the Swedish nineteenth-century novel was written. In textbooks, the important writers before Strindberg and Lagerlöf are Carl Jonas Love Almqvist and Viktor Rydberg. Sometimes a couple of female novelists are included, such as Fredrika Bremer and Emilie Flygare-Carlén. The actual circulation of Swedish novels in translation shows another picture. While Bremer and Flygare-Carlén, together with Marie Sophie Schwartz, were very popular novelists in both Europe and the United States, Almqvist’s and Rydberg’s novels reached very few readers outside of Scandinavia. This article aims to examine the export of Swedish novels in the nineteenth century. Statistics based on the SWED database, constructed in connection to the research project Swedish Women Writers on Export in the Nineteenth Century, is used to describe the distribution of Swedish novels across borders and their translation into different target languages. Similarities and dissimilarities in distribution and reception will be discussed, as well as some of the reasons behind these differences. The number of translated titles, as well as the transcultural circulation of the three most translated and top-selling novelists, Bremer, Flygare-Carlén and Schwartz, are compared to the circulation of Almqvist’s and Rydberg’s translated works. Based on these comparisons, it becomes obvious that if the history of Swedish literature were written from a transcultural perspective based on the contemporary audience’s choice of literary works and writers, it would look very different from the nation-based literary history of today. For example, Almqvist and Rydberg would be edged out by female novelists such as Bremer,
Flygare-Carlén, and Schwartz.