Previous research projects in English Literature

Here you can find information about previous projects in the research field English Literature.

Science fiction and intercultural encounters (Participants: Maria Holmgren Troy, Andreas Jacobsson, Johan Wijkmark)
Internal funding 2016-

The aim of this project is to study interpersonal and interspecies encounters in science-fiction literature, film and television as intercultural encounters. By applying an intercultural perspective, we intend to add to the emergent scholarship that problematizes a one-sided Western hegemonic thinking on SF, a genre long dominated by Anglo-American writers and Hollywood, and contribute to a cross-disciplinary theoretical and conceptual development in SF studies and intercultural studies.
Places of Rest in Worlds of Ruin: A Study of Havens in Post-Apocalyptic Texts (Andreas Nyström) Internal funding (PhD project) 2012-2021

The project is a thematic exploration of places of rest—havens—in post-apocalyptic fiction. English novels are the primary material in concern, but other English-language narrative representations like films, TV-series, computer games, and graphic novels are also considered. The study examines the functions of havens in post-apocalyptic fictions from narratological, pastoral, and spatial perspectives.
Ideology and Symbolism in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy (Fredrik Svensson)
Internal funding (PhD project) 2014–2020

Svensson’s dissertation explores the question as to what kind of knowledge that may be gained from an ideology critical reading of Cormac McCarthy’s novels and the critical discourse that surrounds them. Of particular interest is how the novels respond to the West’s ‘lived relationship’ to the environment and what kind of ‘ecological visions’ previous critics have tried to read into this response. One of Svensson’s objectives, more specifically, is to gauge the political affordances - the risks as well as the possibilities - that may be found not only in McCarthy, but also in the various literary theories that, to date, have been harnessed so as to make sense of his novels.
Book project (published by Manchester University Press, International Gothic series): Nordic Gothic
Participants: Maria Holmgren Troy; Johan Höglund, Director of the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies and Associate Professor of English at Linnaeus University; Yvonne Leffler, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Gothenburg; Sofia Wijkmark, Reader in Comparative Literature, Karlstad University.

While this project traces Gothic fiction in the Nordic region from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, its main focus is on the development of Gothic from the 1990s and onwards in literature, film, TV series, and electronic games. The project aims to give an overview of contemporary Nordic Gothic fiction, to provide a number of case studies and in-depth analyses of individual narratives, and to study these narratives in relation to transnational developments and cross-fertilizations.

We seek to create an understanding of a ubiquitous but under-researched cultural phenomenon by showing how the Gothic narratives make visible political and ecological anxieties haunting the Nordic countries and their welfare systems, and how central these anxieties are for the understanding of identities and ideologies in the Nordic region.
The Rhetoric of Patronage: Cultural Imprints of Helena Northampton Anna Swärdh
The project is funded by the Swedish Research Council (reg. no. 2016-01521)
2017–2019

This project examines the highly rhetorical culture of early modern English patronage through cultural imprints left by Helena, Marchioness of Northampton (1549–1635). Described in one contemporary document as ‘a straungier borne in Swecia’, Helena left Sweden in 1564 and came to exist within the early modern English patronage system, a system of mutual obligations and benefits for achieving authority and influence, and a system that was highly coded in terms of protocol and decorum. Through rhetorical and historical contextualisations of material and cultural objects and activities of central importance to her life, this project will examine how such objects are shaped by and illustrate the workings of patronage.
Margaret Atwood’s Environmentalism: Apocalypse and Satire in the MaddAddam Trilogy Marinette Grimbeek
Internal funding (PhD project) 2011–2017

Margaret Atwood routinely eludes her readers, and the MaddAddam Trilogy is no exception. These three novels, Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013), are ostensibly written in the tradition of environmental apocalypse, yet they constantly undermine its conventions through satire. This study considers the trilogy as an environmental project, performed in the interplay between Atwood’s literary stature, the ambiguous content of her work, and the irreverence with which she blurs distinctions between fact and fiction, art and commodity, and activism and aesthetics. Atwood’s use of the MaddAddam Trilogy in her real-world environmental activism creates uncertainty about how seriously both her art and her activism should be taken. Her opinions on environmental matters are legitimised, but at the same time an urgent environmental ‘message’ is presented as entertainment. Atwood’s message often appears circular: her art carries no message, but Margaret Atwood the writer does have an important message, which she gets to deliver precisely because of her art. Storytelling is a central theme in all three novels, and through both critiquing and relying on commercialism, the MaddAddam Trilogy demonstrates that there is no external position from which the imagination can perform environmentalist miracles. As such, Atwood’s environmental project furthers a profoundly ecological understanding of the world.
Gothic and Uncanny Explorations. Participants: Maria Holmgren Troy; Sofia Wijkmark.
Funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond; Magnus Bergvall Foundation; internal funding (2014-2017)

We organized an international conference with funding from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, after which we edited a special issue for the journal Edda.
Research project “Narrative Strategies in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,” led by Åke Bergvall. The project was funded by the Swedish Research Council 2013-2015 (421-2012-497).

By investigating the foundation of Edmund Spenser’s and Philip Sidney’s primary education (as reflected in the work Positions from 1581, written by Richard Mulcaster, headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School), the project showed that the tension between humanism and reformation found in their ouvre (in particular Book One of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Sidney’s old Arcadia) could be traced back to basic pedagogical assumptions, colored by a Calvinist mindset, that set clear limits to human ability and the efficacy of human reason. Rather than relying on rote learning of moral maxims inherited from the Classical writers, schoolboys in the more Calvinist-influenced centers of learning (such as the ones that both Spenser and Sidney were students at) were trained to measure such Classical texts against Christian dogma, thereby questioning the philosophical and religious foundations of the Classical heritage, at the same time as they were encouraged to retain what was useful and ”good”. To do this, in what became the key pedagogical concept of the Positions, Mulcaster urged his pupils to “maister the circumstance”. The term involved the use of reading strategies that stress the importance of looking at contexts rather than taking statements at their face value. But Mulcaster also posits that all humans are “creatures to circumstance” (Positions Biv; providing what appears to be the first recorded English usage of the phrase), which for the headmaster means being part of fallen humanity, thereby transforming the term into a description of an existential condition.

The project consists of two parts: the description and elucidation of the pedagogical assumptions of Mulcaster’s Positions, described briefly above, followed by readings that seek to trace the practical application of these “positions” through the narrative strategies used in Spenser’s poem and Sidney’s prose romance. To summarize a rather more complex argument, I show that both authors seek to educate their readers by making them aware of the “circumstances” surrounding the actions of their supposed heroes (Redcrosse in Spenser, and the cousins Pyrocles and Musidorus in Sidney).
The book project, Making Home: Orphanhood, kinship, and cultural memory in contemporary American novels, led by Maria Holmgren Troy together with Liz Kella (Södertörn) and Helena Wahlström (Uppsala U.).
The book was published by Manchester University Press (2014). The project was funded by the Swedish Research Council 2009-2011 (421-2008-1285).

Making Home moves scholarship on literary orphans in new directions. It focuses on orphan figures in a broad, multi-ethnic range of contemporary fiction by Barbara Kingsolver, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Safran Foer, John Irving, Kaye Gibbons, Octavia Butler, Jewelle Gomez, and Toni Morrison. It also investigates genres as carriers of cultural memory, looking particularly at the captivity narrative, historical fiction, speculative fiction, the sentimental novel, and the bildungsroman. From a decisively literary perspective, Making Home engages socio-political concerns such as mixed-race families, child welfare, and racial and national identity, as well as shifting definitions of familial, national, and literary home. By analyzing how contemporary novels both incorporate and resist gendered and raced literary conventions, how they elaborate on symbolic and factual meanings of orphanhood, and how they explore kinship beyond the nuclear and/or adoptive family, this book offers something distinctly new in American literary studies. It is a crucial study for students and scholars interested in the links between literature and identity, questions of inclusion and exclusion in national ideology, and definitions of family and childhood
The Language Network for Quality Assurance (LanQua). Maria Holmgren Troy, participant.
A Lifelong Learning Erasmus Network Project (funded by the EU 2007-2010): The LanQua Toolkit has been developed by a network of teachers of languages and related studies across Europe. The 60 partners in the Language Network for Quality Assurance (LanQua) have worked together to map the current landscape for languages in higher education (described in the Frame of Reference) and to reflect on how a subject practitioner-led approach to quality assurance can inform quality assurance processes and enhance the quality of the learning experience for students.
Research project “Augustine and the English Renaissance,” led by Åke Bergvall. The project was funded by HSFR (which later became Swedish Research Council) 1995-1996 (Dnr F 235/94). The project resulted in the following publications: “The Theology of the Sign: St. Augustine and Spenser’s Legend of Holiness,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 33 (1993): 21-42; “Formal and Verbal Logocentrism in Augustine and Spenser,” Studies in Philology 93:3 (Summer 1996): 251-66; “Between Eusebius and Augustine: Una and the Cult of Elizabeth,” English Literary Renaissance 27:1 (Winter 1997): 3-30; Augustinian Perspectives in the Renaissance (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2001).

The project investigates four areas in which the Augustinian presence was felt throughout the Renaissance: psychology, epistemology, the arts, and politics (one chapter is dedicated to each area). Augustine’s intellectual and spiritual development is interpreted as consisting of an early Plotinian period (ca. 386-396), and a later Pauline period (ca. 386-430). These influences resulted in two partially contradictory perspectives: one predominantly vertical (incorporeal and a-historical), the other more horizontal (taking into account the vicissitudes of time and history). The argument of the study is that the Plotinian and Pauline paradigms influenced the Renaissance in different ways, traceable in its literature. Without pretending comprehensiveness, the study follows a rough chronological outline. After an introduction that investigates Augustine’s development, the first chapter centers on Petrarch while the last three have Edmund Spenser as their special focus. Chapters two and four have a broader perspective that in addition to Spenser take in seminal thinkers from Ficino and Luther to Greville and Hooker.
Unfinished Work: Rhetoric and the American Antebellum Literary System. Magnus Ullén

This study of American literature fuses an interest in reading (including allegorical reading) with rhetorical theory. Its starting point is the belated inclusion into the canon of such works as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and William Wells Brown’s Clotel, and the continued exclusion from it of the last phase of Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose writings are otherwise amongst the fixtures of the American canon. Comparing the different ways in which the issues of race and national identity are approached in these and other texts, the study also considers the different reception histories of the works in question, focusing especially upon what strategies have been used to exclude them from and, in some cases, eventually include them in the canon. To this end, the study suggests that we may stand a better chance of understanding how literature functions if we supplant the concept of the literary text with that of the literary situation, a concept developed partly in analogy and partly in critical dispute with the more well-known concept of the rhetorical situation.
Paul de Man’s Lectures on American Literature. Magnus Ullén, with Antoine Traisnel, University of Chicago.

A project, somewhat related to the one mentioned above (in that both in different ways raise the question of allegory in relation to American literature), revolves around a series of lecture notes by Paul de Man on American literature. With Antoine Traisnel, I am currently working on translating and commenting these notes, that we hope to publish in some form, either as articles or a critical edition of the notes. Delivered in 1967 or -68 while de Man was at the university of Zürich, the lecture notes focus especially on the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, offering support for the thesis that the allegorical aspect of Hawthorne’s writings has not been sufficiently considered, while simultaneously greatly expanding the implications of this thesis.
The Resistance to Pornography: Studies in the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Magnus Ullén

This study builds on my Swedish monograph on pornography, Bara för dig, the thesis of which is that to be properly understood, pornography needs be seen not only as a genre but as a genre characterized by a distinctive mode of reading. It will draw together a number of articles I have since written on the subject, four of which have already been published in international peer-reviewed journals, two translations of Swedish book chapters, and three new studies, to a new monograph on the subject.
The Concept of Political Correctness in Sweden. Negotiations of Doxa, Decorum, and Democracy in Contemporary Public Debate. Magnus Ullén, Peter Wikström, Solveig Granath (emerita), Heléne Lööw (Uppsala U.) & Jon Viklund (Uppsala U.).

Situated on the interstices between linguistics, literary, and cultural studies, this project studies shifts in the normative assumptions (doxa) informing public debate in Sweden during the last quarter of a century, and asks specifically how the concept of ‘political correctness’ (or PC, for short) has contributed to these changes. In so doing, it critically examines the claim that contemporary public debate is increasingly polarized, and seeks to explain what lies behind this perception.

Often associated with such issues as multiculturalism, feminism, and other calls for diversity, PC has sparked a lot of controversy since the early 1990s. Whereas some people claim that PC stifles public debate, others retort that this very accusation is in fact a means to prevent certain arguments to be heard. To account for the complex and multifaceted nature of PC and its role in contemporary debate, the project combines quantitative with qualitative methods drawn from linguistics, rhetoric, history, and literary theory. It maps and analyzes how the concept of PC has spread in Sweden, over time and across media, accounting for the way public debate has been shaped by, and has contributed to shaping, PC in the process. In particular, the strategic importance of PC as the parental concept of such phenomena as “fact-resistance” and media-skepticism is highlighted.

More broadly, the project illustrates the importance of reflection for the functionality of democracy, and the centrality of the humanities for maintaining and refining that self-reflective ability.