Det nationella landskapet som kulturminnets medium i Snoilskys Svenska bilder

Abstract

National Landscape as a Medium of Cultural Memory in Snoilsky’s Svenska bilder: The aim of this article is to illuminate, from an ecocritical perspective, the spacial aspect of cultural memory in Carl Snoilsky’s cycle of poems Svenska bilder (Swedish Pictures). According to Jan Assmann, cultural memory locates its signs in a natural space, whereby whole landscapes can also function as a medium of cultural memory. Consequently, they become semanticised, elevated in their entirety to the status of a sign. Thus, a landscape becomes a topographical text of cultural memory, a place of memory that Assmann calls mnemotopos. Drawing on one of the most important tropes of ecocritical thought, i.e. the pastoral, the article examines how Snoilsky’s collection of poems presents the Swedish landscape and how this landscape becomes a vehicle of cultural memory.