Environmental and climatic change has become a frequent motif in contemporary Norwegian literature, television and film, and Norway has the worldwide first organization of writers committed to climate action (The Norwegian Writers’ Climate Campaign, founded in 2013). In this article, we argue that Norwegian climate change fiction and related works draw on elements that relate to specific national and/or Nordic cultural, societal and historical aspects, and that these elements give these works their distinct identity. We focus on four such aspects: (1) references to Norwegian petroculture (since the Norwegian economy is largely based on the export of fossil fuels); (2) an (imagined) intimate connection between Norwegianness and nature, and thus of what often is seen as a typical element of Norwegian national identity; (3) notions of “Nordicity”, and (4) an atmosphere of gloom and melancholia in many of the works (which often has been ascribed to Nordic landscapes, and usually is characteristic for the genre of Nordic noir).
Sissel Furuseth er professor i nordisk litteratur ved Universitetet i Oslo og medlem av arbeidsgruppen ved Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH). Der leder hun den tverrfaglige forskergruppen «Kritisk petroestetikk». Furuseths publikasjoner omhandler et vidt spekter av temaer fra modernisme og metrikk til litteraturkritikk og miljøhumaniora. sissel.
At the end of Sigrid Undset’s medieval trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–1922), the heroine encounters the bubonic plague that so violently hit Europe in the mid-fourteenth century. The aim of this paper is to explore the connections between the 20th century novel and the European tradition of plague literature from the broader perspective of environmental history. Furthermore, it discusses the historical novel’s effect as a distant mirror for 20th and 21st century readers. An underlying argument is that the ethical imperative in Kristin Lavransdatter is affecting the way the protagonist encounters the plague, which may explain what distinguishes Undset from many of her contemporaries.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.