Contemporary Nordic Gothic Fiction
Gothic fiction has become increasingly pervasive and popular and invaded all cultural registers – popular, high brow, children’s and young adult fiction – in the Nordic countries in the last few decades. Contemporary Nordic Gothic has been well received and acclaimed by both critics and audiences, nationally as well as internationally. Even so, it is a more or less unexplored territory in the internationally extensive field of Gothic Studies.
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.
Participants
Maria Holmgren Troy, Director of KuFo and Professor of English, Karlstad University.
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, member of KuFo and Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature, Karlstad University.