Värv och verk Förnyelse och tradition i Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria från tillkomst till tryckt bok

Sammanfattning: Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria [The History of Nordic Women’s Literature; henceforth NKLH] is a history of literature published in five volumes 1993–1998. It was written with the overtly stated intention to change literary history on feminist grounds. The primary aim of this doctoral thesis is to map out and analyze the ways in which NKLH shows renewal and tradition compared to the histories of literature that it was a critique of. What conventions and criteria in the genre of literary history has the group of researchers strived to challenge, and what have they overlooked or neglected? How was the ambition of renewal in NKLH received on publication? What underlying factors in the project’s design and execution can account for the final product? The thesis explores these questions in three main chapters: one that analyses the processes of writing NKLH by means of an archival study, one that analyses the reception of the volumes in newspapers and journals, and one that analyses aspects of renewal and tradition in the four chronological volumes.The most significant ways in which NKLH shows renewal compared to previous histories of literature are in its reinterpretations of canonized authors and in its broad inclusion of different types of texts in the first two volumes. The Nordic approach is another area of renewal. The inter-Nordic perspectives in the volumes tend, however, toward a Danish-Swedish dominance. In some aspects NKLH also shows tradition, most notably in its strong developmental narrative and in its selection of literary genres in the latter two volumes. That NKLH shows both renewal and tradition is a result partly of what the researchers involved wanted to convey, partly of long-lived traditions and expectations within the genre of literary history, and partly of material factors such as organization, funding, geographical outspread and the parallel production of national histories of women’s literature in two of the Nordic countries.