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This paper considers whether the twenty-first-century resurgence of H. P. Lovecraft and weird fiction can be read as a conceptual parallel to the Anthropocene epoch, taking Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s The Age of Lovecraft as a starting-point. The assumption is that the two ‘ages’ are historically and thematically linked through the ‘monsters’ that inhabit them; monsters that include—but are not limited to—extensions, reproductions, and evolutions of Lovecraft’s writings. Preoccupied with environmental issues such as global climate change, the twenty-first-century imaginary has conjured monsters that appear to have much in common with early twentieth-century cosmic horror stories. Considering the renewed interest in Lovecraft and the weird, such developments raise the question: What can (weird) monsters tell us about the Anthropocene moment? This paper maps the ‘monstrous’ in the discourses emerging from the Anthropocene epoch and ‘The Age of Lovecraft’ by considering (new) weird narratives from contemporary literature, graphic novels, film, TV, and video games. Mindful of on-going discussions within ecocriticism, philosophy, and critical theory, the paper discusses a handful of unconventional texts to investigate the potential of the weird for expressing Anthropocene anxieties and for approaching nonhuman realities from new angles.

In many ways the Scottish Reformation was a centralised, top-down event, driven by prominent members of the aristocracy, and imposed in stages throughout the country with greater or lesser success. Certain areas, in particular the Highlands and Islands, were harder to reform than other parts of the country, and certain aspects of pre-Reformation religious life were never fully excised from daily practice. This chapter examines the process of reform as applied to death, burial, and the emotions surrounding these events in the Highlands and Islands, in order to determine what aspects of pre-Reformation practice survived intact, which were modified, and which were removed entirely. The chapter investigates the speed of these changes, and the resistance to them, as this will determine the degree to which the reform of death was welcomed in the most remote parts of Scotland. Finally, this paper will briefly compare the practices surrounding death and burial in the Northern Isles with those of other parts of Scotland in order to determine the influence upon these islands from Scotland in comparison to the lingering practices from before they came under Scottish control.

Contrary to the German Lands and the Nordic Countries the Lutherans in the Netherlands were always a religious minority under a non-Lutheran authority. The history of the Dutch Lutherans is closely related to the migration streams of the 16th and 17th century, especially from the German Lands and the Nordic Countries. But the Nordic countries have barely been considered in the historiography of Dutch Lutheranism. This article shows that the relations between the Netherlands and the Nordic Countries happened on a variety of levels. Even though the confessional motivation wasn't always paramount, this Northern dimension had a decisive influence on the development of Dutch Lutheranism and provides an excellent comparative context to study it. In order to understand its place in the Dutch religious landscape and within the broader context of global Lutheranism, research on the role of the Nordic countries is indispensable.

The article gives a short account of the development of the spoken language from Old Norwegian to Modern Norwegian, the transition from Norwegian to Danish as the written language in Norway and the language of the church around the Reformation. It is argued that the changes in the spoken language were a long-term development completed, on the whole, at the time of the Reformation, that the transition from Norwegian to Danish as the written language was also well on the way before the Reformation, and that the vernacular was not abruptly introduced in the Lutheran service. So, the linguistic situation in the centuries following the Reformation is only to a lesser degree a result of the Reformation itself. The Reformation should first and foremost be credited with the translation of the Bible into Danish and with it the consolidation of a modern form of Danish which was spread through the extensive religious literature of the time. Later this consolidated written language formed the basis for the development of a higher variety of spoken Norwegian.

This article explores the possible implications of the relationship between Orkney and Shetland and Norway for understanding the spread of the Reformation, focusing on the period between the late 1520s, when Reforming ideas began to be preached in Bergen, and 1560, when the Reformation was introduced into Scotland, including Orkney and Shetland. Draws on a scholarship which has shown the importance for the Reformation of language, trade, migration and urban/rural distinctions it investigates tantalising hints of contact between Orkney and Shetland, Norway (particularly Bergen) and Germany in questions of religion. This article does not seek to revise current understandings of the relationships of Orkney and Shetland to Scotland but seeks to explore what insights into (proto-)Reformation processes in Orkney and Shetland when possible influences from debates the Norwegian context – specifically Bergen – are considered alongside the influence of Scottish debates about religion. It concludes that whilst there is some evidence of contacts between individuals and that these contacts must have had aspects which related to religious practice, both the rural nature of Orkney and Shetland communities, and their relative isolation, meant that Reformation ideas were slow to take hold.

Kinodriften i Norge 1940–1945 var preget av nye politiske omstendigheter. I artikkelen utforskes spørsmålet om hvordan kinobransjens autonomi ble påvirket av den tyske okkupasjonen og NS’ forsøk på å gjennomføre nasjonalsosialistisk revolusjon. Arbeidshverdagen i kinobransjen ble sterkt påvirket av politiske utskiftninger og innføringen av nye institusjoner som hadde til hensikt å gjennomføre en omfattende reorganisering av hele film- og kinofeltet.Ideologisk påtrykk og politisk press fra tyske og norske aktører rundt programoppsetningen var et særtrekk. Krigssituasjonen skapte også generelt en del praktiske utfordringer. Det var likevel ikke slik at presset og hindringene for normal kinodrift var konstant eller like stort overalt. Artikkelen viser hvordan kinoene i Norge ble påvirket og rammet forskjellig, blant annet ut fra hva slags type kino det var snakk om.Ettersom kinoene ble forsøkt brukt som propagandakanal for den tyske okkupanten og NS, ble kinoene også et sted for «demonstrasjoner». Både tyske og norske myndigheter var klar over sprengkraften som lå i denne formen for hverdagsmotstand, og forsøkte å forebygge gjennom ulike tiltak.Dette førte til at de kinoansatte befant seg i et krysspress. Ved noen kinoer valgte ledelsen frivillig samarbeid med de nye kinomyndighetene. Ved andre kinoer valgte ledelsen en motstandsholdning. Men ved de aller fleste kinoene ble det staket ut en tilpasningskurs.Statens filmdirektorat hadde høye ambisjoner om total omlegging av det norske kinosystemet. Dette handlet ikke bare om ideologisk betingede målsetninger, men også om bransjespesifikk reformpolitikk. Artikkelen foreslår å se okkupasjonsperioden ikke som en parentes eller som en unntaksperiode i norsk film- og kinohistorie, men understreker kontinuitetstrekk mellom perioden før, under og etter andre verdenskrig. NS’ utskjelte film- og kinopolitikk la på mange områder grunnlaget for politikken på dette feltet etter 1945. Cinema in Norway from 1940 to 1945 was characterized by new political circumstances. This article explores the question of how the autonomy of the cinema industry was influenced by the German occupation and the attempt of Nasjonal Samling (NS) to implement a national socialist revolution. Cinemas were heavily influenced by political replacement of key personnel and the introduction of new institutions intended to undertake a comprehensive reorganization of the entire film and cinema field.Ideological pressure and political pressure from German officers and Norwegian officials and propagandists, was a distinctive feature. However, the political pressure and the practical obstacles were neither constant nor similar across the country. The article shows how different types of cinemas in Norway were affected in different ways.As cinema was used as a propaganda vehicle for the German occupier and NS, the cinemas also became a place of everyday resistance and organized civil resistance. “Demonstrations" in the cinemas were widespread.The cinema staff were in the line of fire, between intersecting demands, interests and expectations. At some cinemas, the management chose eager cooperation with the new cinema authorities. At other cinemas, the management chose resistance. However, most cinemas adapted professionally to the new laws of cinema politics.The Norwegian Film Directorate had high ambitions for a total restructuring of the Norwegian cinema system. This was not just about ideologically determined goals, but also about reform policies. The article suggests that the occupation period was neither a parenthesis nor an exceptional case in Norwegian media history, and accentuates several features of continuity before, during and after the occupation years. The scorned film and cinema politics advocated by the new regime during the occupation laid the foundation for government policy in the same areas after 1945.

Utstilling organisert av Byarkivet i Tromsø i anledning Verdensteaterets 100-årsjubileum. Utstillingen åpnet på Tromsø bibliotek og byarkiv den 29. august 2016 og fortalte historien til Verdensteatret i tekst og bilder.

Denne artikkelen er basert på publikums egne minner og opplevelser fra fortidige kinobesøk. Siktemålet er å belyse hvilken viktighet kinoinstitusjonen hadde, sosialt og kulturelt, ved å la publikum selv sette ord på sine erfaringer. Artikkelen fokuserer på stumfilmperioden, og det empiriske materialet som presenteres er utdrag fra nasjonale minneinnsamlinger fra hverdagslivet i Norge samlet inn i 1964 og 1981. Minnene er forfattet av «vanlige folk» født i årene rundt 1900. Artikkelen diskuterer ulike filmhistoriske perspektiver på kinopublikum, så vel som minner som historisk kildekategori. Om lag 15 prosent av det innsamlede minnematerialet inneholder omtaler av film og kino; de beskriver ulike holdninger til det å gå på kino, bestemte minner om kinobesøk og filmer, filmscener og skuespillere, samt ulike visnings- og programpraksiser. Artikkelen studerer særlig minner fra to regioner, Oslo og Hedmark. Det konkluderes med at minnesamlingene er en rik kilde som tilbyr unik innsikt i en avansert kinokultur i filmens første årtier. Materialet åpenbarer «kinogjengeren» ikke som en abstrakt størrelse, men som faktiske personer, individer som til sammen danner det vi betegner som «kinopublikum». This article is based on the audience's own memories and experiences from past cinema-going practices. The aim is to illuminate the importance of the cinema institution, socially and culturally, by allowing audiences to put into words their own experiences. The article focuses on the silent film era, and the empirical material consists of extracts from nationwide collections of memories from everyday life in Norway collected in 1964 and 1981. Common people born in the years around 1900 author these memories. The article discusses different perspectives on the audience, as well as memories as a historical source. About 15 percent of the total nationwide memory collection contains mentions of different attitudes towards the cinema, as well as memories of cinema-going in general, exhibition practices, specific films, scenes and actors. The article further explores the empirical material from two regions, Oslo and Hedmark, finding that these memories are a rich source that offers unique insight into an advanced cinema culture in the early years of cinema history. In this material, we meet «the cinema goers» not as abstract constructions, but as actual people and individuals who constitute what we denote as the «cinema audience».

Verdensteatret åpnet sine dører sommeren 1916 og er i dag Norges eldste kinobygg som fortsatt brukes for å vise film. Vi vet om åpningsforestillingen den 4. juni 1916 at det svenske melodramaet Madame de Thebes Spaadom fra 1915, med norsk tittel Skjæbnens Søn, står på programmet og at Bladet Tromsø kunne fortelle om lange køer. Likevel vet vi svært lite om enkelte elementer av filmfremvisningen som for eksempel filmmusikken og publikumsopplevelsen. Denne artikkelen undersøker derfor hvordan Robert J. Flahertys Nanook of the North (1922) ble fremført på amerikanske kinoer og i Norge, med noen små sideblikk til Danmark og Sverige. Verdensteatret – Tromsø municipal cinema – is the oldest cinema building still in operation in Norway. It opened in 1916, showing the Swedish melodrama titled Madame de Thebes Spaadom, and the local newspaper Bladet Tromsø reported the event. Nevertheless, there is little knowledge about many aspects of film exhibition during these years in general, and exhibitions at Verdensteatret in particular. This article therefore investigates the different modes of exhibition of Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) in the US and in Norway, with some glimpses from Denmark and Sweden.

Denne artikkelen gir en kort oversikt over den historiske bakgrunnen for utviklingen av det som resulterte i etableringen av en unik kommunal film- og kinoinstitusjon i Norge. Videre ser artikkelen nærmere på de seneste endringene som har resultert i et sammensatt kinolandskap, med både en offentlig kommunalt basert kinosektor og en privat internasjonal gren. Norske kinoer sammen med kinokjeder i Skandinavia har i løpet av få år blitt innlemmet i verdens største globale kinoselskap, det i utgangspunktet amerikanske selskapet AMC, i dag eid av den kinesiske Wanda-gruppen. Artikkelen kommenterer også endringene som har funnet sted innenfor filmproduksjon og distribusjon i Norge. This article provides a brief outline of the historic background for the development of what resulted in the establishment of a unique municipal cinema institution in Norway. Thereafter the article looks more closely at the recent changes leading to a new mixed cinema landscape with both a public municipally based cinema sector and a private international branch. Norwegian movie theatres, together with movie theatre chains in Scandinavia, have within a few years been included into the largest global movie theatre company in the world, the initially American company AMC, now owned by the Chinese Wanda group. The article also comments upon changes within the field of film production and distribution in Norway.

De første norske videobutikkene åpnet dørene i 1979 og de siste stengte i 2017. I løpet av denne tidsperioden rakk de å bryte NRKs monopol på film og tv-serier i hjemmet, de ble utskjelt, de ble en av de viktigste kulturinstitusjonene i landet og de tilbød et relativt stort utvalg i film. Ved å studere bransjeblader, annonser, lokalaviser og kommunale arkiver tegner denne artikkelen et bilde av de norske videobutikkenes historie på nasjonalt plan og utdyper dette med en lokal case. The first Norwegian video-stores opened its doors in 1979 and the last ones closed in 2017. During this time, they were the first to break the state monopoly on filmed home entertainment. The video-stores became notorious, but they also established themselves as some of the most important cultural institutions in the country, with a relatively wide selection of films to offer customers. By studying trade magazines, advertisements, local newspapers and local council archives, this article traces the history of the Norwegian video-stores on a national level and, through the use of one case example, on a local level.

Editorial foreword.

Artikkelen omhandler det vi langt på vei kan betegne som en glemt kinokultur. Dette at husmødre som målgruppe på 1950- og 1960-tallet strømmet til kinoene over hele landet for å hygge seg med gratis, timelang reklamefinansiert opplysningsfilm laget spesielt med tanke på deres arbeidshverdag og ansvarsområde. Norske husmødre ble fra 1953 til og med 1972 ble invitert til disse filmvisningene som foregikk fortrinnsvis på dagtid. Husmorfilmene introduserte nye produkter som vaskemaskin og dampstrykejern, maling og bonevoks og viste steg for steg hvordan produktene skulle brukes. Nye matvarer og nye oppskrifter og etter hvert halvfabrikata ga innsikt i ulike bruksmåter og nye tips i det daglige matstellet. Produktpresentasjonene ble avløst av rent underholdende innslag hvor tidens mest kjente komikere og artister (Leif Juster, Henki Kolstad, Wenche Myhre, Elisabeth Grannemann m.fl.) henvendte seg til husmødrene med musikalske innslag og komikk som gjorde at latteren runget i salen. De kjente navn bidro også til, sammen med moteoppvisninger og konkurranser, å trekke husmødrene til disse kinovisningene. Husmorfilmene ble vist på kinoer over hele landet og skal i gjennomsnitt ha blitt sett av hver tredje eller fjerde husmor der de ble vist. De norske husmorfilmene var basert på en svensk markedsføringside, og de kan også forstås som en allmennfjernsynskulturs svar på de kommersielle TV-kanalenes formiddagsmagasiner rettet mot samtidas viktigste forbrukere, husmødrene. Artikkelen tar for seg hvordan husmorfilmproduksjonen ble etablert og gjennomført i Norge, legger vekt på hvordan filmene ble distribuert og vist og drøfter hvordan spredte kilder til husmødrenes opplevelser bidrar til å kaste lys over denne spesifikke kinokulturens betydning. This article concerns a largely forgotten cinema culture of the 1950s and 1960s in Norway. From 1953 to 1972, Norwegian housewives were invited to free day-time cinema screenings of ‘housewife films’ once or twice a year. The hour-long housewife film promoted goods and new housework technology, providing instructions for usage as well as demonstrating the benefits of electrical washing machines, modern kitchen design, pre-prepared food and other items for a modern household. These ‘slow’ commercials were combined with sequences where the most popular comedians, actors and musical talents of the time entertained the audience. The sequences contributed to the promotion of the screenings, as did fashion shows before the screening along with competitions offering valuable rewards, food and cleaning product samples. The films were screened throughout the country and were on average attended by every third or fourth married woman. The idea of this marketing strategy towards the households’ main consumer came from Sweden and can be seen as an alternative to the day-time consumer magazines developed within commercial television - both in regard to the financial basis as well as in content and direct address. The article examines how these films were produced, distributed and screened, and discusses existing sources to housewives’ experiences in and around these cinema screenings.

This article addresses the question whether unreliable narration, as the concept is understood in the tradition following Wayne Booth’s original definition, can occur in non-fictional stories. Contrary to Pekka Tammi’s conclusion in a recent article, this article’s answer is affirmative. It seeks to demonstrate, through a comparative analysis of respectively Mark’s and Matthew’s stories about the Canaanite woman (Mark 7:24–30 and Matthew 15:21–28), how Matthew comes forward as an unreliable narrator, and that his narrative unreliability is a function of what James Phelan has termed underreporting. The textual analysis, which leans on Gregory Currie’s and James Phelan’s theories of unreliable narration, argues that far from being more or less identical stories, as is suggested by various exegetes, Matthew’s pericope is significantly different from that of Mark. It is different both thematically and regarding the portrayal of the figure of Jesus, but also, and not least, by pursuing a more complex and daring communicative strategy based on unreliable narration and a system of multilayered irony. In concluding the theoretical discussion of unreliable narration, I suggest not only that unreliable narration is possible in non-fictional stories, but also that it is a somewhat misleading concept when applied to the kind of stories Wayne Booth normally referred to, namely fictional first-person narratives.

Religion does not play a major role in Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun’s work. The one brilliant exception to this detached and seemingly cavalier attitude toward religion or, should I say, Christianity, is Hamsun’s masterpiece, Growth of the Soil (1917), which won him the Nobel Prize in literature in 1920. In this mythic novel, Hamsun draws upon a plethora of biblical motifs to create a heroic cosmogony that proposes an alternative to the rapid social and economic transformation under way in Norway in the second half of the nineteenth century and a vision of Norway founded on the cultivation of the land through hard labor and the populating of the earth. Numerous critics have remarked on the Biblical allusions in the novel (e.g., Per Thomas Andersen, Nettum, Rottem, Storfjell, Øyslebo); however, only Rolf Steffensen and Andreas Lødemel have studied the role of religion in Growth of the Soil in any depth. I will expand upon their work to examine whether Biblical allusions are part of a rhetorical strategy that aims at a coherent worldview. Biblical motifs cleverly interspersed throughout the novel suggest that it is always gesturing toward a world outside its pages through a dialog with pre-existing texts, in this case the Bible, absorbing and transforming voices from culture and society, historical memory and national identity. I will reexamine not only the place of Christianity in this important novel but also the foundational myth that undergirds it, that is, the idea that Isak is the founder not so much of a new civilization as a biblical exemplum of a traditional way of life and old values based on the cultivation of the land. That said, upon closer examination, Growth of the Soil does not amount to a faithful adaptation of the Old Testament; the novel is fraught with contradictions and the narrator also subverts its biblical framework by promoting an ambiguous reading of key scenes and motifs. Isak is not a bona fide practicing Christian and the novel should not be seen as an apology for Christianity in any way, shape, or form. Hamsun’s Isak is no biblical patriarch, even though he, too, at first appears to be divinely chosen to bring about a new beginning for humankind; instead, Isak turns out to be just another human being—albeit an exceptional one—who works hard to make his life dream come true. Moreover, it “er tvilsomt om MG var tenkt som en ‘agrarisk opbyggelsesbog’” (Rottem, Hamun og fantasiens triumf 167); however, an intertextual reading does enrich the novel’s narrative as well as moral authority by drawing on Biblical persona and antecedents. Finally, I feel compelled to address a postcolonial perspective if for no other reason than that an insistence on a Biblical reading of the novel largely ignores the import of the Samí, who ultimately pay the price of Isak’s colonization of the land, which prefigures the conquest of Northern Norway by homesteaders like him as well as the advance of what is euphemistically called “civilization.”

Inspired by Wittgenstein, this article starts with a suggestion that we need to discuss the question of method in literary studies on the basis of a differentiation between different research acts. It argues that a methodical procedure for the interpretation of literary texts is best understood as a response to ethical demands on the reader. Building on Iris Murdoch’s notion of attention, and to a notion of pitfall-awareness that emerges from Stanley Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein, the article suggests some principles on which such a methodical procedure might be based, and argues for the importance of such an approach as a way of strengthening scholarly literary interpretation as an open and communal field of activity, in which not only the resulting interpretations but also the procedure itself invites and even requires the critical scrutiny of peers.

In a novel critics have described as a "thriller-like" coming-of-age story, Louise Erdrich's The Round House (2012) integrates two apparently conflicting approaches to Native American law. First, Felix S. Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law legitimizes the need for working with allies to Indigenous peoples in developing contextual applications of settler state laws. The second draws on the authority of authorless Anishinaabe stories and dreams. While Cohen and his descendants in tribal law practice are allies to the Anishinabeg, dream narrations by the narrator's grandfather affirm the contemporary vitality of Anishinaabe approaches to justice. Finally, Erdrich's narration suggests why restorative justice for women in Indigenous communities in the United States should matter for her international audience.

In the beginning of the 2000’s a meeting takes place at one of the major hospitals in Northern Norway, between a Sámi patient Juvvá, and his roommate, a retired Norwegian engineer. The engineer shows a negative attitude towards his Sámi roommate. Based on a symptomatic reading of three stories, this article presents a character analysis of Juvvá’s birgengoansttat, coping skills, in his encounter with the engineer. The analysis focuses on Juvvá as a trickster figure representing the Sámi people, and the engineer as stállu, a set of structures that represent the majority’s values system. The engineer’s negative mindset towards his Sámi roommate represents the shadow of centuries of repression and lack of knowledge about Sámi language, culture and history. The Norwegian government’s assimilation politics, the Norwegianization policies, function as the contextual backdrop for the investigation and of the reactions of the engineer. In my role as a scholar and mediator of the stories, I also function as a character in this investigation, at a meta level. This requires some focus on the context that frames my reading. The analysis of the stories reveals how non-verbal communication and humor are used to show resistance towards derogatory attitudes in the majority system. Juvvá’s agency is to cope, and take control of his own situation in the narrative of the hospital’s white world. In his role as a trickster, Juvvá represents a boundary-crossing figure and demonstrates a flexibility in finding a creative space to exercise his abilities to coping in the meeting with his hostile roommate.

Når man skal arbeide med Knut Hamsun i skolen, står norsklærerne overfor et dilemma: Hvordan skal man ta hensyn til at Hamsun ikke bare er en av Norges mest kjente forfattere, men også Norges mest kjente nazist? Hvordan skal historien om Hamsun presenteres på en balansert måte? En gjennomgang av en del lærebøker i litteratur og litteraturhistorie forteller om hvordan Hamsunproblemet har blitt håndtert i skolen etter krigen. Er det riktig, slik nyere litteraturforskere har hevdet, at vi har skjult Hamsuns politiske sider, og i stedet hyllet den geniale forfatteren? Teachers in Norwegian schools face a dilemma when teaching literature: How do they balance the presentation of Knut Hamsun – one of Norway’s most influential writers AND most prominent supporters of the Nazi occupation? How can Hamsun's life and writings be presented in a balanced way? By examining school textbooks in literary history, we can better understand how “the Hamsun problem” has been handled in school. Is it correct, as it has been claimed, that the political side of Hamsun has been hidden away in Norway, and instead saluted as the brilliant author?

This article is dedicated to the film Wings (1966) directed by the Soviet director Larisa Shepitko. With its story of a World War II veteran, Nadezhda Stepanovna Petrukhina, Wings makes for an interesting case when looking at women’s and veteran’s status in the Soviet society of the 1960’s, and morality and memory culture more generally speaking. But as Nadezhda Stepanovna is a former fighter pilot who continuously return to the sky in her daydreams, Wings is also an excellent case for a critical discussion of the meaning of the airspace. Aviation and the airspace hold certain connotations is Russian culture (not necessarily excluding other cultures) that open up for a different kind of reading of this film, in particular because of the intersections between gender, space and memory. Hierarchies are often presented trough a metaphor of verticality in Russian culture. By examining the different notions of verticality, both physical and metaphorical, in Wings, I not only argue that this film can be read in a new way, but also bring new perspectives on the established theory of women’s position in Russian culture as morally superior to men. This again can be linked back to the spatial understanding of Russia, as the term Motherland in Russia particularly strongly makes a connection between femininity, the mother, and space, the land.

The article analyses the ways in which the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev understood Russian space and geography, beginning with the texts that he wrote during the First World War and ending with his book The Russian Idea (1946). It was characteristic of Berdiaev to extensively recycle passages from his own texts, not least those that put forth the claim that there was a correspondence between Russia’s vast and wide-open spaces and the “Russian soul.” However, the article argues that Berdiaev’s seemingly similar phrases had different meanings in different contexts. In the 1910s, his perspective was predominantly critical, if speculative, positing that the acquisition of large territories had prevented the Russian “self-organization” in thought and culture. After the 1917 revolutions and his own emigration in 1922, by contrast, Berdiaev gradually became more essentialist in his approach to Russian space, seeing the vast territories as perfectly matching the strivings and quests of the Russian people. The article contextualises Berdiaev’s understanding of space both in relation to nineteenth-century traditions of interpreting Russian geography and to the political upheavals that took place during his lifetime.

In this article I discuss and analyze the dystopian and utopian discourses in Alisa Ganieva’s novel The Mountain and the Wall (Prazdničnaya gora, 2012; English translation 2015). My particular interest lies in the connection between geographical imagination and postcolonial themes, as well as the relationship between gender and space. The chosen approach to Ganieva’s novel leaves out many other interesting topics, such as the role of Islam in the story, and questions about national and ethnical identity, but I will only elaborate upon them whenever they appear relevant to the outlined approach. My aim is not to label Ganieva’s work as a postcolonial novel, but to discuss the possibility to read it from a postcolonial point of view and to read a postcolonial thematic in it, among many other interesting themes.

Editorial foreword

This article offers an analysis of the trope of ruin in the poetry of Aleksandr Kushner (born 1936), in particular through a close reading of two of his poems: “In a slippery graveyard, alone” and “Ruins”. The analysis of these poems is preceded by an overview of ruin philosophy from Burke and Diderot to Simmel and Benjamin, with particular emphasis on the way the trope of ruin contemplation stages a confrontation between the self and what transcends it (death, history, nature, etc.). This philosophical background serves as a heuristic tool to shed light on the poetry of Kushner. Through the trope of ruin, Kushner explores the legitimacy of poetic speech after the collapse of all meta-narratives. Kushner has no truck with Diderot's solipsism, nor with Hegel's bold narrative of progress, nor with Simmel's peaceful reconciliation with the creative forces of nature. Nor, really, does he intend to bear witness to history, the way Benjamin does in the faint anticipation of some miracle. Instead, Kushner posits the endurance of a community united not around a grand project, but around the idea of carrying on in the face of everything, muddling through despite the lack of hopes for a transformational future and making the most of fleeting moments of positivity that emerge out of the fundamental serendipity of history.

In many capitals, the central public square is the place where people go en masse when they wish to voice their discontent. The squares used for such collective actions are diverse. Each square has its unique combination of symbols and history; they are used in different ways by the public; and they often have distinct physical characteristics. Yet, in social sciences, when determining what makes collective actions successful, space is often overlooked. In this article, I present an approach for analysing public space in relation to mass protests. I then apply this approach to the Belarusian capital Minsk, where virtually no protests have been successful during the post-Soviet period. In what ways are mass protests in Minsk affected by the perceived (symbolic), social and physical elements of the city’s public spaces? I examine the centre of Minsk in general, and analyse two central squares in particular. The article is based mainly on qualitative, semi-structured interviews with protesters, observers and opposition leaders; research literature; and on my own fieldwork and experiences from living in Minsk. I conclude that space is contributing to the difficulties facing the Belarusian opposition in several ways. 1) The perceived elements of Minsk and the two main squares do not have a preferable symbolic value to the opposition. 2) The social elements of the city show that the political centre is avoided by the public, thus making protests less noticeable. 3) This latter point is important, given that the physical elements of the squares makes policing particularly easy and swift. The physical elements of the squares also limit the protesters’ communication, movement and flexibility. I argue that a spatial perspective should be included in research on collective actions.

In the last decades of the fifteenth century, at least three texts by Italian and German humanists included reports on an Arctic island newly discovered by the Russians. Modern Russian scholarship variously identifies this island as Spitsbergen (meaning a part or even the whole archipelago presently named Svalbard) or Novaya Zemlya. This article suggests that the still enigmatic Arctic discovery was largely shaped by theoretical assumptions of late medieval geographers. The rumors about the island closely followed the route through Europe of the famous German scholar and poet Conrad Celtis, and they may go back to one and the same source. A search for this Arctic island in Celtis’s own body of work reveals its description in his poem, Germania generalis, and in one of his erotic geographic elegies, the Amores. It is further argued that Celtis may have left the only cartographic depiction of the island on his Barbara Codonea map, printed as an illustration to the fourth book of the Amores.

This article discusses the relationship between the private international oil company (IOC) Royal Dutch Shell and Russia as an oil producing and oil exporting state during a period when oil prices were moving towards unforeseen heights (2005-2007). By examining this dynamic relationship, this study aims to contribute to an understanding of Russia’s discursive and culturally produced history. The history of a state-oil company interaction has shown that the use of legal instruments is a good indicator to determine the nature of the relationship between oil-producing states and IOCs – a relationship that often has been characterized by periods of cooperation or conflict.At the centre of inquiry is how the oil major understands the law in Russia, and in particular the enforcement of the country’s formal written rules during legal conflicts over the development of the Sakhalin-II oil and gas fields (in which Shell until December 2006 controlled a majority stake). After identifying the violations of formal laws, I conclude that Shell understands that the formal rules of the game are subordinate to the unwritten laws of energy politics and in particular the informal demands of contemporary Russian society. The article also illustrates that oil-producing states have the upper hand in conflicts over the development of oil and gas resources.

In this article, I discuss Knut Hamsun’s last book On Overgrown Paths [På gjengrodde Stier] (1949) from the perspective of a pathography, meaning an autobiography that focuses on a person’s illness and its consequences. Due to his actions during WWII, Hamsun was subjected to a psychiatric examination in 1947 and diagnosed as having permanently impaired mental faculties. Hamsun opposed this diagnosis, and the book both aims at demonstrating his mental ability and depicting his experience of being an unwilling patient. This article looks at how the autobiographical narrator reflects upon his experiences as a patient, and how the text contains a certain critique of the clinic and the patient-doctor relationship. It sheds light on how the motif of travel and quest is important for the narrator’s experience of being ill, and it concludes with a brief discussion of how medicine and literature are disciplines that may benefit from an interdisciplinary approach to studying both fiction and autobiographical literature.

In this article I try to define arctic drama in a concrete and metaphorical way by touching upon the dramatic oeuvre of Knut Hamsun. In Play of Life Hamsun plays with nature and the polar as topos. The drama, situated in a small market town in the Nordland area of northern Norway, uses coastal nature and culture as a framework. Nature is a driving force in this pre-expressive drama where the mythical enlightens the inner and symbolic dimension of human actions and spiritual conditions. This article will also show how nature is used to reflect the inner world of the characters. I will end with a look into the northern-Norwegian identity, the authorship of Hamsun, and the biosophical dimensions studied by the philosopher Peter Wessel Zappfe.

This article examines Hamsun’s The Ring is Closed (1936) through the lens of modernity and modernism. A common notion has been that The Ring is Closed is an exception from the division between an early modernist phase and a later realist phase in Hamsun’s oeuvre. This article argues that Hamsun deals with modernity in a fundamentally different way in 1936 than he did in the 1890s. Today we should be able to see Abel Brodersen’s fatalism, cynicism, and lack of drive as an expression of 1930s modernism. What are the characteristics of such modernism? To which of his contemporary modernist characters can we compare Abel Brodersen? What literary techniques does Hamsun employ, and how can we characterize the language and the narrative structure? How does the modernist Hamsun in 1936 compare to Hamsun in 1890? These are some of the questions posed in this article.

The Knut Hamsun Jubilee 2009 was heavily criticized by nationals and internationals alike, which was reflected in a large number of media debates. The article critically analyzes the media coverage of the Knut Hamsun Jubilee 2009. It shows how the media’s coverage and rhetoric of the Jubilee effected the discussion about its legitimacy. Assuming that the media has an impact on the public’s negotiation of thought patterns, and that the media is capable of influencing public opinion, the article examines the following two aspects: What kind of persuasive strategies were used in public discussions in the press about the Knut Hamsun Jubilee 2009? How did the Norwegian Online Press deal with critical comments especially from foreign critics? The article aims at elaborating the media’s role in present public discussions about Writers and Literature.

The Norwegian term å gjendikte, meaning “to recreate”, is always my guiding principle while translating Norwegian literature into Russian. Intonation is a very important factor. For example in the earliest Hamsun novel, Bjørger (1878), it was very important for me to present a rural Norwegian atmosphere while avoiding incorrect associations and allusions and also bearing in mind strong cultural differences. While working with Hamsun’s Sværmere (1904), it was essential that I pay careful attention in conveying the right intonation and word choice, so that the reader could properly perceive the irony and humor of the novel. In many cases, the language of Chekhov, whose characters sometimes have typological resemblance to Hamsun’s, was a stylistic pattern for me. This article will use quotations from both authors to illustrate this stylistic resonance.

Åpningstale

This article asserts that the character of Thomas Glahn in Pan should be understood as a sport hunter. The popularity of sport hunting increased in Norway in the second part of the 19th century, causing a public discussion on the ethics of this kind of hunting compared to hunting for survival. The article hypothesizes that Hamsun knew J. B. Barth's writings about the value of hunting and experiencing nature. In his “Afhandling om den Fornøielse, Menneskene finde i jagten” (1865), published for a second time around 20 years later, Barth defines the ethos of sport hunting, and argues that young men from the bourgeoisie class can gain important values and education from hunting. The article shows how the character of Glahn can be read as an example of Barth's view of the ideal hunter. However, in one important aspect, Glahn does not live up to the expectations that the reader in Hamsun’s time might have had about the ideal hunter. Barth claims that engaging in ethical sport hunting also improves the hunter’s mental health. Glahn obviously does not confirm this claim. The unfulfilled expectations on this matter provoke questions within the reader about Glahn’s mental health and recalls Hamsun’s early interest in the human mind in a modern world.

Knut Hamsun has always been regarded as an important prose writer in Georgia, admired for his unique literary gifts. His novel Mysteries and its enigmatic protagonist, Nagel, have especially fascinated Georgian readers. Guram Gegeshidze (1934 –) is one of the best-known novelists in post-Stalinist Georgia. His novel, A Sinner was written in 1966. That there is «something Scandinavian» in A Sinner and that the novel even bears a resemblance to Hamsun’s Mysteries was pointed out almost as soon as the novel was published. In spite of this, A Sinner is quite clearly an independent work with an intrinsic value of its own and its own characteristic inner logic. When A Sinner was written, there was a renewed interest in the modernist tendencies that had arisen in the years before the Soviet occupation of 1921. When we bear in mind that Hamsun’s writings of the 1890s have always been particularly popular in Georgia, it is not so surprising that one of the best Georgian novels from a period that may be characterized as a new wave of Georgian modernism has such a creative and interesting relationship with Hamsun’s masterpiece.

In Hamsun’s novel Pan, Lieutenant Glahn holds an essentialist notion of masculinity that is somewhat outdated in the context of emerging Norwegian modernity. His acts of violence, which are performative of his male pride, not only bring harm to others, but also become destructive to himself. The masculinity crisis enacted in Pan is put into the context of the social, historical, and cultural changes related to gender and modernity that occurred during the end of the 19th century in Norway and beyond.

This paper outlines major directions in the reception of Knut Hamsun in the Romanian cultural printed press. The research is based on a plethora of articles in Romanian cultural periodicals spanning the years 1902–1989. The results shall be encompassed in a doctoral thesis on the same subject. The structure of the paper follows a chronological overview of the phases of his reception. Because the interwar period has been discussed in detail in other previous papers, focus shall be put on the communist era. The first oscillations occur between the years 1940–1947. As a result of the Stalinist regime, Hamsun is only portrayed in terms of his political views. Communism thus reduces his authorship to a minimum. A renewed interest emerges in the 1980s through a new series of translations and articles. This interest is then compounded with the founding of the Department of Scandinavian Languages and Literatures in Cluj in 1991 and continues to the present. Articles from all of these time periods are evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively to acquire a holistic image of how Hamsun is received by Romanian culture.

Even though Knut Hamsun stubbornly denied it, all his life he had a strong and ambivalent interest for Henrik Ibsen. Quite well known are Hamsun's many attacks on Ibsen in articles and lectures, letters and novels. Less known is that there are several coinciding (intertextual) motifs between Ibsen and Hamsun. In several of Ibsen's plays and poems the mountain motif is associated with poetic vocation and a descent and entry into an enclosed world of fantasy and imagination. The mountain motif is for sure attached to a form of penetration into a supernatural and demonic underworld, but also related to an upward and vertical movement, towards light, air and literary clarity. One finds strong traces of this double Ibsenian movement also in Hamsun's authorship, for example in the novels Pan and In Wonderland. But Hamsun seems to exceed Ibsen: in Hamsun's literary universe, the mountain motif is also linked to a revitalized dream of happiness, joy and an existential demand of exceeding oneself in the direction of a more authentic way of being human in the modern world.

Often when the theme of Hamsun and the Sami is discussed, the focus is on the nation building structures and negative generalizations contained in Growth of the Soil (1917). Hamsun’s earlier novel Pan (1894) is sometimes mentioned in passing as an example of a more positive or neutral attitude towards the Sami. This essay adds some nuance to this narrative by examining the motif of the Sami in Pan with a line drawn to the novel Rosa (1908). The presence of the Sami is limited in Pan. Hamsun relegates them to the relatively inhospitable mountains surrounding the coastal village of Sirilund. When they do appear, Glahn’s interactions with the Sami play an interesting part in the story of the porous identity of this narrating main character. In Rosa, which like Pan is set in Sirilund, Edvarda remembers Glahn, and she makes a symbolic link between his sexual power and the Sami. Later, in what is for Hamsun an uncharacteristically sexually explicit scene between Edvarda and the Sami character Gilbert Lap, we can find an echo of the famous scene from Pan where the goat god makes his only appearance, mocking Glahn through silent laughter.

This article examines Gunnar Sommerfeldt’s 1921 silent movie adaptation of Knut Hamsun’s Nobel Prize novel Markens Grøde [Growth of the Soil] (1917). The article argues that what characterizes this very first Hamsun film adaptation is its emphasis on the dramatic and the spectacular and its foregrounding of northern Norwegian nature. Inspired by Martin Lefebvre’s distinction in Landscape and Film (2006) between nature-as-setting and nature-as-landscape, this article argues that the film not only uses nature as its main setting, but that it also makes use of a series of autonomous landscapes with a fairy tale dimension. Several of its visual compositions of persons and landscapes seem to be inspired by Norwegian nature and fairy tale painter Theodor Kittelsen’s work, e.g. Soria Moria Slott, Nøkken, Pesta and Norge, Norge.

In the essay “Sjelens Amerika” [“The America of the Soul”], Karl Ove Knausgård claims that the reason why we still perceive Knut Hamsun’s novels as fresh and present is because they display our own modern world in its very creation, at a time when it was full of “the power of the unfinished” and not yet stiffened in accomplished systems. In this article, I argue that the idea of “the power of the unfinished” is an aesthetic category describing the core of a poetics common to Knausgård and Hamsun.

This paper examines Knut Hamsun’s travel writing, from his many newspaper articles about America published before The Cultural Life of Modern America (Fra det moderne Amerikas aandsliv, 1889) – his idiosyncratic and very personal reckoning with America – to his only real (i.e., formal) travelogue or travel book, In Wonderland (I Æventyrland, 1903), documenting his visit to the Russian Caucasus. The article focuses on some common themes as well as striking differences among these works, so as to highlight Hamsun’s creative use of the travel genre. As the term “foray” in my title suggests, there is something illicit and transgressive about Hamsun’s travel writing. He does not readily conform to the norms of the genre; rather, he transforms the genre to suit his own purposes by infusing a large dose of his idiosyncratic genius in everything he writes about the faraway lands he visits.

This article challenges a non-political interpretation of Hamsun’s work, by arguing that Hamsun's poetics is characterized by a radical reactionary vitalism.

This article discusses the play The Old Nazi: The Tragedy of a Genius, written by the Czech journalist Martin Komárek and staged in Prague in 2010/2011. It presents both the formal and the thematic aspects of the drama and argues that this unique text deserves to be known outside of the Czech Republic. Komárek made himself familiar with various information about Hamsun’s life, but this did not curb his imagination; his play works very well as theater. The drama contains many fictitious events and dialogues, yet at the same time, it does not distort in any major way the historical image of Hamsun. The play is thus well balanced and provides a very good basis for potentially successful theater productions.

This article uses a regional perspective to compare the novels of Lars Berg with Knut Hamsun’s novels set in northern Norway. What characterizes the northern Norwegian storytelling tradition, and is it possible to define it? In order to close in on this concept, this article focuses on certain aspects of setting, including: fishery, trade, language, and character.

Can we learn anything about well-being and what it is that constitutes the ‘mystery’ of health by reading Knut Hamsun’s novels? This article argues that Knut Hamsun in his description of the character Pauline Andreassen in the August trilogy (1927–1933), illustrates central elements of what modern radical philosophers (Ivan Illich, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Aaron Antonovsky) understand about good health and well-being, namely: the ability to adapt to a society, the ability to establish a life based on one’s own interests and possibilities, and the ability to cope with different emotional losses and challenges in life. This article also gives a brief introduction to Hamsun’s harsh criticism of bio-medical institutions and the way they tend to medicalize society. As a contribution to the health/humanities debates, this article also investigates how the humanities can enhance our knowledge and understanding of health and well-being.

In this essay I take a closer look at the Norwegian concept of stemning, and how this concept has been applied to Hamsun’s early work. I look at both the semantics and the history of the concept, and at Hamsun’s own use of it. The main insight of this investigation is that stemning is a concept that is not limited to subjective or objective experience, but must be understood outside of the object/subject dichotomy. These insights are then used in an analysis of Hamsun’s short story, ”Onde dage”, where I show that Hamsun is not trying to capture a subjective experience, but a common human reality.