Volym 146, 2025

This study explores the aesthetical and political connections between Ellen Key (1849–1926) and C.J.L. Almqvist (1793–1866). It also analyzes the standing of romanticism in Sweden around the year 1900. While Key’s interest in Almqvist is well documented, notably in the lecture where she dubs him Sweden’s most modern author, their deeper affinities and differences have not been fully appreciated. A common thread in their works is the desire to blur the lines between art and life, which serves as a starting point for analysis. Both Almqvist and Key seek to create an art of living that revitalizes individuals through aesthetic means, proposing various techniques to infuse everyday life with beauty and sacredness. For both, the concept of a ‘beautiful’ life is likewise a measure of humanity. The study also highlights the contentious aspects of Key’s relationship with Almqvist. Key believed that the idealistic worldview of the early 19th century had been realized through new scientific discoveries, allowing her to rhetorically maneuver beyond the horizon of romanticism in search of a modernity more modern than Almqvist’s.

This article discusses Eva-Marie Liffner’s novel Imago (2003) in relation to contemporary literary engagement with archives and archival practices. Informed by the archival turn – a theoretical shift that reconceptualized archives as sites of knowledge production and power rather than neutral repositories of the past, what has been labelled archival fiction interrogates the relationship between archives, history, and narrative. Drawing on perspectives from Jacques Derrida, Linda Hutcheon, Jerome de Groot, and literary criticism on archives, this article examines Imago as an instance of archival fiction, thematically and structurally problematizing the archive as a site of truth. Through its protagonist Esmé Olsen, who stumbles upon a box of documents from the Stasi archives, Imago engages with archival desire, materiality, memory, and the urge to reconstruct specific moments of the past. However, the novel ultimately resists the idea that archives can yield absolute truths and instead foregrounds gaps, silences, and the elusiveness of historical knowledge, questioning the possibility of retrieving what once happened. Analysing Liffner’s novel in dialogue with recent critical discussions on archival fiction, the article argues that Imago complicates Chadwick’s & Vermeulen’s (2020) suggestion of different directions within such fiction at the turn of the twenty-first century. Furthermore, the article situates Liffner’s work within broader literary traditions and discusses how the combination of elements of historical novels, postmodern fiction, and gothic narrative informs Imago as an archival fiction. In conclusion, it is suggested that Liffner’s novels construct an intricate intertextual archive of recurring motifs, figures, and landscapes, ultimately illustrating how literary fiction engages with archives not only thematically but also at the level of form by enacting archival processes of accumulation, transformation, and reinterpretation.  

I artikeln undersöker jag Margit Palmærs noveller ”Tidens äktenskap” som publicerades i Idun 1930–1931 som inlägg i samtida debatter. Jag menar att Palmær inte bara använder de sju novellerna till att beskriva äktenskap i förändring. I hög grad formulerar hon frågan om äktenskapet som en fråga som berör kvinnors yrkesarbete och konstnärskap – och ställer dem emot kraven på kvinnors uppoffring för hem och barn. Syftet är således att visa hur Margit Palmær använder frågan om äktenskapet som ett sätt att diskutera kvinnors villkor i yrkeslivet och hemmet. I analyserna läggs särskilt fokus på beskrivningar av rum, hem och hushållsarbete, och de värderingar som knyts till dessa. Därigenom lyfter jag fram de rumsliga aspekterna av kvinnorollens omvandlingar under mellankrigstiden. Jag visar att Palmær (som var socialist) positionerar novellerna så att de uttrycker både hennes egna och veckotidningen Iduns kvinnopolitiska linje, och insisterar på gifta kvinnors rätt till yrkesarbete och konstnärskap. I ”Faster Bollas förmaksmöbel” tematiserar Palmær också funktionalismen och det modernistiska hemmet som ett radikalt traditionsbrott då hon låter en generationskonflikt centreras kring det rätta sättet att möblera ett hem.

This article examines Sami Said’s book Monomani (2013) with a focus on the intersection between narrative and cultural identity. Monomani is a seemingly autobiographical account of Sami’s struggle to write Said’s debut novel Väldigt sällan fin (2013). It takes the form of a letter to his friend Sara where he apologizes for withdrawing from her while finishing writing his book.                       The analysis takes its departure from a dilemma that Said has described in interviews and radio programs: he writes to express his true self, liberated from a limiting and falsifying identity imposed on him by others based on his ethnicity and religion; but when he writes about himself, he thereby also causes an inner division and a falsification of his own self. This dilemma is placed within a theoretical framework of narrative and cultural identity, focusing on the issues of authenticity and autobiographical narration. The theoretical discussion highlights, on the one hand, how authenticity in a both narrative and cultural context can be conceptualized in terms of what Mark Freeman and Jens Brockmeier have called narrative integrity, and, on the other hand, the critique of monological autobiographical identity both by autobiography scholar like Georges Gusdorf and Paul John Eakin and by theorists of selfhood like Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero.                       Based on these premises, the analysis of Monomani shows how Sami, the narrator of Monomani, achieves narrative integrity by disposing of cultural identity and attaining the identity of author but that he can do so only through a monological narration which refers back to his fictionalization of himself in Väldigt sällan fin and which severs the connection between life and narrative. In the second part of the analysis, it is then shown how Monomani undermines the validity of this monological account by thematizing the scenes of address that, according to Butler, structure self-narration. The analysis concludes by arguing that, through emulation of Gertrude Stein’s autobiographical writing, Said creates in his two books an integrated autofictional work where the positions of narrator and reader are doubled and fictionalized, whereby the dilemma of an alienating cultural identity is returned to its dialogical foundation and turned into an appeal for recognition of identity beyond social categorization.

Bidraget utgör en textkritisk utgåva av en tidigare aldrig publicerad novell av Viktor Rydberg, De trenne bröderna från 1841.

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