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August Strindberg (1849–1912, Sweden's internationally recognised dramatist, was an astonishingly prolific all-rounder. The new National Edition of his works will run to seventy-two volumes: he was a writer of novels, short stories, essays, journalism and satire, he experimented with early photography, and in recent years his paintings have achieved the recognition they deserve. His novel The People of Hemsö (1887) will come as a surprise to most English-language readers, used as they are to seeing the bitter controversialist of plays like The Father and Miss Julie or the seeker for cosmic meaning and reconciliation of those mysterious later dream plays To Damascus and A Dream Play. This novel, a tragicomic story of lust, love and death among the fishermen and farmers of the islands of the Stockholm Archipelago, reveals a very different Strindberg. The vigour and humour of the narration, as well as its cinematic qualities, are such that we witness a great series of peopled panoramas in which place and time and character are somehow simultaneously specific and archetypical, and we leave the novel with memories of grand landscapes and spirited scenes.In a recent essay Ludvig Rasmusson wrote: 'For me, The People of Hemsoe is the Great Swedish Novel, just as ...The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [is] the Great American Novel'. His comparison is an apt one: if the Mississippi becomes the quintessence of America, the island of Hemsoe and the archipelago become the quintessence of Sweden.

Two British environmental activists are discovered dead amongst the whale corpses after a whale-kill in Torshavn. The detective Hannis Martinsson is asked to investigate by a representative of the organisation Guardians of the Sea - who shortly afterwards is killed when his private plane crashes. Suspicion falls on Faroese hunters, angry at persistent interference in their traditional whale hunt; but the investigation leads Martinsson to a much larger group of international vested interests, and the discovery of a plot which could devastate the whole country.

'He realised that he would drown here. Someone had crafted this seat to drown people. To drown him. Terror rushed from his brain to rouse every cell in his body, but there was nothing to be done. He was well and truly tethered. Slowly it dawned on him that he did know why he was sitting here. He'd spent all his life running from this nightmare, and now he'd landed in its clutches.'Dead Men Dancing begins with the discovery of a corpse on the beach, the body of a man who has been shackled to rocks and left to drown. As the journalist Hannis Martinsson investigates, he comes across evidence of more deaths which have been caused in the same way, and starts to realise that they are all linked to a local revolt several decades earlier, which tore a community apart. The repercussions have continued to the present day, and Hannis' enquiries soon put his own life in danger.

The Nordic countries are often imagined by the outside world to be a haven of sexual equality and exemplary gender relations. Gender - Power - Text: Nordic Culture in the Twentieth Century presents a more nuanced picture to the English-speaking world, interrogating the constructions, negotiations and transformations of gender and power in a diversity of texts and textual practices. GENDER theory informs all sixteen essays in this volume, and a productive and provocative juxtaposition of disciplinary and theoretical boundaries is in evidence throughout. The contributors draw on the work of theorists including Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Julia Kristeva and Hayden White, reading this against texts by Nordic writers, filmmakers and artists such as Edith Sodergran, Ellen Key, Knut Hamsun, Monika Fagerholm, Mai Zetterling, Gunvor Hofmo, Ingmar Bergman, Liv Ullmann and Vibeke Gronfeldt.POWER and its distribution in society are analysed both as a problem central to the construction of the nation-state and welfare society, and as a dynamic underlying the cultural texts which function as sites where social practice, political engagement and aesthetic creativity meet and merge. TEXT is understood in this volume in a wide sense, encompassing painting, handicrafts, film , photography and installations, as well as poetry, the novel, and drama. The texts explored by the contributors belong to the Danish, Finnish, Finland-Swedish, Norwegian, Sami and Swedish traditions, but the cross-currents that constitute a wider 'Nordic' cultural community are also teased out by connections and continuities between the chapters.

Karlsen is a down-on-his-luck private investigator looking for work. When the only job on offer is a contract killing, Karlsen agrees despite his lack of experience. Things don't go to plan and it seems the contract is open to negotiation. The play follows the twists and turns of an inexperienced contract killer with a weakness for turquoise dresses and wide-eyed women. This absurdist comedy by one of Denmark's best-loved writers sees the fates of the eponymous contract killer, his target, the employer and his wife, twist, turn and hang in the balance. What is a life worth? Who will survive? And will the hair dye ever make it to Pakistan?

This spirited and at times sinister novel ensnares the reader in a tangled encounter between modern-day Scandinavia and the ancient world of myth. In the 1980s, a hardworking Icelandic businesswoman and her teenage daughter Dis, who has been arrested for apparently committing a strange and senseless robbery, are unwittingly drawn into a ritual-bound world of goddesses, sacrificial priests, golden thrones, clashing crags and kings-in-waiting. It is said that Gunnloth was seduced by Odin so he could win the 'mead' of poetry from her, but is that really true, and why was Dis summoned to their world? The boundaries dissolve and the parallels between Gunnloth's circle and the strange company into which Dis's mother is drawn as she fights to clear Dis's name grow ever closer. The earth-cherishing goddess seems set on a collision course with strategic thinker Odin who has discovered that iron can be extracted from the marshes where she resides, and environmental disaster also looms in the modern context, brought into sharp focus by a shocking world event.At the same time the novel is a moving, under-the-skin portrait of a mother in crisis, cast into a maelstrom of conflicting emotions by seeing her daughter under arrest and in prison. Dis's father has refused to get involved, claiming he is too busy. Her mother is left to tussle with lawyers and fight to clear Dis's name. She goes to Copenhagen in order to be near the prison where Dis is on remand. The couple's business ambitions for a government contract will be in shreds if the prosecution accuses Dis of involvement with a terrorist group, but on the other hand, how can any mother willingly pursue the option of agreeing that her own daughter is mentally ill? Particularly when she has followed Dis into the depths of legend in her quest for the truth?

Victoria Benedictsson published Money, her first novel, in 1885. Set in rural southern Sweden where the author lived, it follows the fortunes of Selma Berg, a girl whose fate has much in common with that of Madame Bovary and Ibsen's Nora. The gifted young Selma is forced to give up her dreams of going to art school when her uncle persuades her to marry, at the age of sixteen, a rich older squire. Profoundly shocked by her wedding night and by the mercenary nature of the marriage transaction, she finds herself trapped in a life of idle luxury. She finds solace in her friendship with her cousin and old sparring partner Richard; but as their mutual regard threatens to blossom into passion, she draws back from committing adultery and from the force of her own sexuality. The naturalism and implicit feminism of Money place it firmly within the radical literary movement of the 1880s known as Scandinavia's Modern Breakthrough. Benedictsson became briefly a member of that movement, but her difficult personal life and her struggles to achieve success as a writer led to her suicide only three years later.

To Pieces is Henry Parland's (1908–1930) only novel, published posthumously after his death from scarlet fever. Ostensibly the story of an unhappy love affair, the book is an evocative reflection upon the Jazz Age as experienced in the Baltic. Parland was profoundly influenced by Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, and reveals his narrative through fragments of memory, drawing on his fascination with photography, cinema, jazz, fashion and advertisements. Parland was the product of a cosmopolitan age: his German-speaking Russian parents left St Petersburg to escape political turmoil, only to become caught up in Finland's own civil war – Parland first learned Swedish at the age of fourteen. To remove Parland from a bohemian and financially ruinous life in Helsinki, his parents sent him to Kaunas in Lithuania, where he absorbed the theories of the Russian Formalists. To Pieces became the focus of renewed interest following the publication of a definitive critical edition in 2005, and has since been published to great acclaim in German, French and Russian translation.

Today, change in our material lives is a constant. Many now living have seen the advent not only of the mobile phone and the Internet, but also of space exploration, vaccines and even indoor plumbing. This in contrast to the world you now enter in The Railroad, where the diminutive Matti and Liisa are aging in a corner of the world in which peasant life has remained unaltered for centuries. When the iron rails reach the forests of Eastern Finland, however, that solitude and constancy are forever altered. The Railroad (1884) was prose writer, poet, translator and journalist Juhani Aho's first major literary work. There is some disagreement as to whether he or Aleksis Kivi (best known for his 1870 novel Seven Brothers) should be named the first professional Finnish author. There is no doubt, however, that Aho's modern usage of the Finnish language and application of realistic style - although romantic elements also appear in The Railroad - place him as one of the progenitors of Finnish literature, which has been closely identified with realism ever since.In both his topics and his style we witness a critical stage in the cultural development of what is now one of the most advanced nations in the world.

An economical and haunting tale, published in book form in 1904 and set in the sixteenth century on the snowbound west coast of Sweden, Lord Arne's Silver is a classic from the pen of an author consummately skilled in the deployment of narrative power and ambivalence. A story of robbery and murder, retribution, love and betrayal plays out against the backdrop of the stalwart fishing community of the archipelago. Young Elsalill, sole survivor of the mass killing in the home of rich cleric Lord Arne, becomes a pawn in dangerous games both earthly and supernatural. As the deep-frozen sea stops the murderers escaping, sacrifice and atonement are the price that has to be paid.

Written in 1912, Selma Lagerlöf's The Phantom Carriage is a powerful combination of ghost story and social realism, partly played out among the slums and partly in the transitional sphere between life and death. The vengeful and alcoholic David Holm is led to atonement and salvation by the love of a dying Salvation Army slum sister under the guidance of the driver of the death-cart that gathers in the souls of the dying poor. Inspired by Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol, The Phantom Carriage remained one of Lagerlöf's own favourites, and Victor Sjöström's 1921 film version of the story is one of the greatest achievements of the Swedish silent cinema.

The Löwensköld Ring (1925) is the first volume of the trilogy considered to have been Selma Lagerlöf's last work of prose fiction. Set in the Swedish province of Värmland in the eighteenth century, the narrative traces the consequences of the theft of General Löwensköld's ring from his coffin, and develops into a disturbing tale of revenge from beyond the grave. It is also a tale about decisive women. The narrative twists and the foregrounding of alternative interpretations confront the reader with a pervasive sense of ambiguity. Along with the narrative technique, the spell of the ring extends into the two subsequent volumes, Charlotte Löwensköld (1925) and Anna Svärd (1928).

To most English-language readers and theatre goers, Strindberg is mainly known for naturalistic plays such as 'Miss Julie' and 'The Father', but the dramatic production of Sweden's national playwright is infinitely richer and more extensive than these would suggest. This volume presents four of Strindberg's lesser known one act plays, 'The Bond', 'Facing Death', 'The Outlaw' and 'Simoom', written between 1871 and 1892, which showcase Strindberg's remarkable range. 'The Bond' and 'Facing Death', which fall at the end of the time span, are familiarly naturalistic plays set in contemporary European settings which demonstrate Strindberg's provocative engagement with contentious issues of his day. The early experiment 'The Outlaw', however, takes place in the frigid landscapes of the Viking north, drawing heavily on the style of Icelandic sagas. In Simoom, written in 1889, a practically gothic narrative transports us to the scorching deserts of French colonised Algeria, allowing us to observe the beginnings of Strindberg's experimental, mystical phase which culminated in 'A Dream Play'.Different as the four plays are, however, when read together they form a thematic unity, revealing the beating heart of Strindberg's creativity, the issue at the core of his writing: love as a war eternally waged man and woman, husband and wife, children and parents and individuals and society. The four plays were translated from the Swedish by Agnes Broomé, Anna Holmwood, John K Mitchinson, Mathelinda Nabugodi, Anna Tebelius and Nichola Smalley.

Captain Jager is the well-meaning but temperamental head of a rural family living in straitened circumstances in 1840s Norway. The novel focuses on the fates of the women of the family: the heroic Ma, who struggles unremittingly to keep up appearances and make ends meet, and their eldest daughter Thinka, forced to renounce the love of her life and marry an older and wealthier suitor. Then there is the younger daughter, the talented and beautiful Inger-Johanna, destined to make a splendid match - but will the captain with the brilliant diplomatic career ahead of him make her happy? With great empathy and affection for each member of the family Lie evokes the tragedy of hopes dashed by the harsh social and economic realities of the day, and the influence of one person who dares to think differently. Both in the landscape and in the characters the wildness of nature is played out against the constraints of culture.

Nils Holgersson's Wonderful Journey through Sweden (1906–07) is truly unique. Starting life as a commissioned school reader designed to present the geography of Sweden to nine-year-olds, it quickly won the international fame and popularity it still enjoys over a century later. The story of the naughty boy who climbs on the gander's back and is then carried the length of the country, learning both geography and good behaviour as he goes, has captivated adults and children alike, as well as inspiring film-makers and illustrators. The elegance of the present translation – the first full translation into English – is beautifully complemented by the illustrations specially created for the volume.

Nils Holgersson's Wonderful Journey through Sweden (1906–07) is truly unique. Starting life as a commissioned school reader designed to present the geography of Sweden to nine-year-olds, it quickly won the international fame and popularity it still enjoys over a century later. The story of the naughty boy who climbs on the gander's back and is then carried the length of the country, learning both geography and good behaviour as he goes, has captivated adults and children alike, as well as inspiring film-makers and illustrators. The elegance of the present translation – the first full translation into English – is beautifully complemented by the illustrations specially created for the volume.

Murder in the Dark sports a winning combination of engaging crime narrative and cool, unsentimental appraisal of Scandinavian society (as seen through the eyes of its shabby, unconventional anti-hero). There are elements of the book which now seem quite as relevant as when they were written, and like all the most accomplished writing in the Nordic Noir field, there is an acute and well-observed sense of place throughout the novel. The descriptions of Copenhagen channel the poetic sensibility which is the author's own: 'Copenhagen is at its most beautiful when seen out of a taxi at midnight, right at that magical moment when one day dies and another is born, and the printing presses are buzzing with the morning newspapers.'

This collection of essays celebrates Professor Janet Garton's outstanding contribution over four decades to research, teaching and leadership in the field of Scandinavian Studies. Contributions from some two dozen established and emerging scholars discuss Scandinavian literature, drama, letters and visual culture with a focus on themes germane to Janet's long-running course at UEA, From Free Love to Decadence: love, modernity, travel, faith, gender, sexuality, textuality, community, and the body.

This anthology brings together essays written by BA, MA and PhD students of Nordic Cinema at UCL. The essays discuss the key directors and movements in Nordic film history, including Victor Sjöström, Carl Th. Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, Lars von Trier, and Dogme 95, but they also include work on topics and eras rarely discussed in English, such as alternative endings in early Danish cinema, inter-war drama in Norway, and the Finnish war film. The essay format is a staple of an Arts and Humanities education, but even the best student essays tend to end up languishing in a filing cabinet. This book project lets a selection of student essays on Nordic Cinema enjoy an afterlife, and at the same time provides the students involved with experience of publishing and other facets of the book production cycle in the digital era.

The God of Chance focuses on the relationship between Ana, a high-flying Danish career woman from the international finance sector whose work is her life, and the young teenager Mariama, two women whose circumstances are completely different. Ana first meets Mariama selling snacks on a beach in Gambia, and the girl gradually becomes a substitute for the family she has never had. The novel moves to Copenhagen and then to London as Ana brings Mariama to Europe to be educated; the girl finds the cultural shock and living with Ana intensely difficult, whilst Ana's obsession with her leads to her own carefully controlled life descending into chaos. The story depicts the gulf between European affluence and Third World poverty; it explores our dependence on money, our need to be in control in every situation, and the problematic relationship between sponsor or donor and recipient. The scene moves from colourful depictions of life in a luxury hotel in Africa, cheek by jowl with desperate poverty, to elite designer flats in Copenhagen, and finally the bustling multicultural community on the streets of London.This novel from 2011 is the latest by the prize-winning Danish author Kirsten Thorup. Her most well-known works are her series of four novels about little Jonna from the provinces, which are also about growing up into the rapidly-changing Danish society of the late twentieth century; and Bonsai (2000), an unflinching account of the scourge of Aids and its devastating effect on an ordinary family.

Fru Inés is a city novel, vividly evoking the sights, sounds and smells of nineteenth-century Constantinople. The city is a hub, a meeting point of East and West, where privileged Europeans enjoy a cossetted existence screened from the tumult and misery of the streets. One of the privileged is Ines, a Spanish Levantine from Alexandria, whose marriage to a Swedish consul has brought her a life of enviable luxury; but behind the polished facade she is lonely and unfulfilled, trapped in a loveless marriage. Her yearning for passion leads her to embark on an affair with a naive young Swede, Arthur Flemming; but their love is threatened from the start by portents of disaster and the threat of discovery, and Inés is inexorably drawn to seek rescue from the sordid dealers from whom she had been so careful to keep aloof.

A curse rests on the Löwensköld family, as narrated in The Löwensköld Ring. Charlotte Löwensköld is the tale of the following generations, a story of psychological insight and social commentary, and of the complexities of a mother-son relationship. Charlotte is in love with Karl-Arthur – both have some Löwensköld blood. Their young love is ill fated; each goes on to marry another. How we make our life 'choices' and what evil forces can be at play around us is beautifully and ironically depicted by Selma Lagerlöf, who was in her sixties when she wrote this tour de force with the lightest imaginable touch.

Barbara, originally written in Danish, was the only novel by the Faroese author Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen (1900–1938), and yet it quickly achieved international best-seller status and is still one of the best-loved twentieth century classics in Danish and Faroese literature. On the face of it, Barbara is a straightforward historical novel in the mode of many a so-called 'romance'. It contains a story of passion in an exotic setting with overtones of semi-piracy; there is a powerful erotic element, an outsider who breaks up a marriage, and a built-in inevitability resulting from Barbara's own psychological make-up. She stands as one of the most complex female characters in modern Scandinavian literature: beautiful, passionate, innocent, devoted, amoral and uncomprehending of her own tragedy. Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen portrays her with a fascinated devotion.

This novel tells the story of the misalliance between Lucie, a vivacious and beautiful dancing girl from Tivoli, and Theodor Gerner, a respectable lawyer from the strait-laced middle society of nineteenth-century Norway. Having first kept her as a mistress, Gerner is so captivated by Lucie's charms that he marries her, only to discover that his project to turn her into a proper and demure housewife is continually frustrated by her irrepressible sensuality and lack of fine breeding. What had made her alluring as a mistress makes her unacceptable as a wife. His attempts to govern her behaviour develop gradually into a harsh tyranny against which she rebels in a manner which brings misery and despair to both. Amalie Skram, a contemporary of Ibsen, expresses the same criticism of repressive social mores and hypocrisy here as he does in plays like A Doll's House and Ghosts, although in a deeply personal way. In this novel from 1888, as in her other novels, she makes an impassioned statement on the double standard, contributing to the great debate about sexual morality which engaged many Scandinavian writers in the late nineteenth century. She also presents a closely observed realistic depiction of a lively cross-section of Kristiania society from the turn of the century, ranging from high society dress parties to arid country cottages to dark and dingy tenements reeking of poverty.

Set at the end of last century, The Sharks is a thrilling tale of mutiny and shipwreck, which bears comparison with Melville's Moby Dick or Conrad's Typhoon in its suspense and its evocation of the fascination of the sea. It is also the story of mankind's voyage into the twentieth century, suspended between the empty skies and the bottomless depths, dreadfully aware of its potential for self destruction but clinging to a belief in the preservation of a fragile humanity. The narrator, Peder Jensen, is both competent second mate and unworldly philosopher, whose brain 'lacks walls, a floor and a roof'; through his eyes we follow the dismantling of the rigid power structure on board as a community begins to emerge.This novel from 1974 is the last one by Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe (1920–1976), one of Norway's most original, outspoken and controversial modern writers.

Klaus Rifbjerg's 1958 novel has become a constantly reprinted classic of twentieth-century Danish literature. It is the story of the unequal friendship between two teenagers, Janus and Tore, told from the point of view and in the schoolboy slang of the hero-worshipping Janus. Tore is a gifted student, mature beyond his years, effortlessly able to impress teachers and fellow pupils alike with his knowledge and charm. It is a foregone conclusion that he will fall in love at the school dance with the equally peerless Helle, and she with him; together they are the school's golden couple. It seems they will achieve a perfect union; but there is a snake in Paradise in the form of Helle's mother, fru Junkersen. Janus watches helplessly as the golden dream turns into a nightmare which destroys the two young lives, and he realises his own complicity in perpetuating an unsustainable myth. Rifbjerg has been a central figure in Danish literary life – as novelist, poet, playwright and cultural commentator – for the last sixty years, publishing works at an astonishing rate, around 175 in all. This novel, which was his first, is generally acknowledged to be his masterpiece.

This is the first full-length study in English of the oeuvre of Elin Wägner – feminist, suffragist, pacifist and environmentalist – and also the first to include texts representing a wide range of genres. The focus on gender and community, studied in relation to dominant and alternative discourses, shows a number of Wagner's texts to be considerably more radical than has been observed previously. Some of them are found to have outlined bold alternatives to the Swedish welfare state, and the combination of gender and environmentalism in some of the late texts anticipated much more recent ecocritical work. The edition contains an updated selected bibliography and preface to the second edition.

This autobiographical novel is based on Strindberg's life in the 1870s and 1880s, and focuses on his marriage to Siri von Essen. It purports to be a vehicle for explaining to himself his role in the relationship from its ecstatic beginnings to its catastrophic conclusion. Strindberg was writing at the time of the modern women's movement and the intense Nordic debate on sexual morality, and the novel echoes on an anguished personal level the theme of the battle of the sexes. It is one of his many and varied attempts to write his own life, to use himself as raw material. The novel was written in French and published as Le Plaidoyer d'un Fou in 1895. However, the French editor had made radical alterations to Strindberg's text – how radical was not discovered until 1973, when the original manuscript came to light. Previous translations into English have been made from the published French version or the Swedish translation of it; this is the first translation of Strindberg's original text.

The Nordic Research Network (NRN) began as a forum for UK- based early career researchers to share their work with peers in a convivial intellectual environment. As a multi-disciplinary gathering, the regular conference provides an opportunity for scholars in all areas of Nordic research to keep up with the diverse subjects and projects being pursued by colleagues across the country. The third conference was attended by researchers from a range of British institutions and took place at UCL over two days on the 5th and 6th of September 2013. Each year since its inauguration, the NRN conference has grown and evolved; this marks the first time the conference proceedings have been published. The conference has provided many new scholars with their first opportunity to introduce their research to the academic community. This book, similarly, gives a number of early career researchers a chance to see their work in print and reach a wider audience. The papers, organised into thematic chapters, reflect and showcase the diversity of subject areas, approaches, and methodologies of the Nordic Studies postgraduate research community. Together, they help illuminate larger questions of how cultural, social, and historical identities are mediated through literature, historical narratives, films, and architecture.