Review: Galleri 66. En historie om nyere dansk litteratur

Abstract

Anne-Marie Mai. _Galleri 66. En historie om nyere dansk litteratur_ Anne-Marie Mai is a prolific historiographer of Danish and Nordic literature. In the early 2000s she edited the three-volume _Danske digtere i det 20. århundrede_. As the recent Editor in Chief of the expansive, multilingual and now digital _The History of Nordic Women’s Literature_, Mai has promoted a more inclusive literary history and helped canonize the work of women writers; and in the monumental three-volume _Hvor litteraturen finder sted_ (2010-12) Mai explored the long history of Danish literature centring on the actual places where literature has been written, read and preserved from Medieval cathedrals to YouTube. With _Galleri 66_, Mai’s aim is similarly to find a new way to engage in literary historiography, which, she admits, is a discipline that has had difficulty attracting new readers; partly, she suggests, because we have become suspicious of narrow national and chronological histories, and partly because the traditional historiographic division of literary history into decades, movements and -isms, as it has been drilled into generations of students, results in simplistic and distorted views of literature. Instead, Mai proposes to capture the recent 50 years of Danish literature as refracted through the year 1966 – a major year for literary debuts (e.g. Henrik Nordbrandt, Dan Turèll, Klaus Høeck, Vagn Lundbye and Peer Hultberg), but also a year where literary and social upheavals materialized.