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Multilingual Citizens of the World: Literary Fiction in Norwegian Book Collections in the Eighteenth Century
Karin Kukkonen
Bourgeois readers in eighteenth-century Norway could find literary, religious and non-fictional books in Danish (that is, the language they read as their own in the period). However, a look into the reading materials offered through libraries, reading societies and lending libraries shows that a substantial part of their reading, in particular when it comes to literary fiction, in this case novels, plays, stories and narrative poetry, was in foreign languages (mostly French, German and English). This article introduces a database of book collections in eighteenth-century Norway and outlines a range of possible analyses on its basis, connecting book history, history of reading and literary history. It thereby complements existing analyses of the publication and circulation of novels in periodicals and their evaluation in periodical criticism in the eighteenth century.
1 A. Nøding, ‘Vittige kameleoner: Litterære tekster i norske adresseaviser, 1763–1769’ (PhD thesis, Oslo, 2007) and M. Egeland, ‘“De fleste Romaners Læsning er skadelig”: Suhm, Sneedorff og romanen’, Edda, 108:1 (2021), 8–21. If one sketches the situation in general terms, Norwegian book collections present a picture of transnational exchange similar to the one Hakon Stangerup identified for the novel in Denmark:
2 H. Stangerup, Romanen i Danmark i det attende aarhundrede (Copenhagen, 1936). for the better part of the century, French and English, and then German, dominated the market. Even though noteworthy examples in the genre predate 1800, Danish and Norwegian novels did not emerge as a cultural force until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Norwegian world of letters is closely connected to Danish publishers and book distribution networks, but its dynamics of canon-formation and transnational adaptations was not necessarily copied from Copenhagen. An analysis of book collections, which not only hold works currently published (as the materials on which Stangerup bases his analysis) but also books to be read and re-read, allows for a glimpse of the links and loops across national literatures and across time-bound publishing trends. This article attempts to trace some of the dynamics of the larger cultural horizons of Norwegian readers in the eighteenth century and beyond through case studies of
Pamela, German popular novels and the after-effects of
Werther in one of the first examples of the Norwegian novel in the nineteenth century.