Fagerholm Goes Oprah: Minor Literature, Global Market, and Gender in Literary Exchange

Abstract

In this article, I study the journey of the Finland-Swedish author Monika Fagerholm’s (b. 1961) novel The American Girl to the pages of O, The Oprah Magazine. This event, here called “Fagerholm goes Oprah”, offers an illustrative example of the global movements of literature today, and of the ongoing negotiation of relations between local and global, the Nordic countries and the USA, minor literature and the global market. The article describes the different phases of the transmission of this novel, studies the means by which a novel from a minor body of literature transgresses its geo-linguistic position and, in this specific case, demonstrates the role of gender. In this way, the novel not only creates fictive, transnational spaces for its female characters and readers, but it also enters and contributes to a network of female agents in widely different geographical and cultural contexts. The event “Fagerholm goes Oprah” is a sign of the ongoing globalization of the literary field, but its reception also reveals the presence of an opposing tendency: the continuing significance of localization in literary exchange. All in all, the novel and its reception illustrate the many strategies used to create a connection between two different cultures, and also display the importance of various cultural currents in the transmission of the novel, such as feminism and Nordic Noir.