Transnational Reception: Nordic Women Writers in Fin de Siècle Finland

Abstract

This article investigates the transnational and translingual reception of Nordic women’s writing (among authors writing in Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish) in a multilingual country, Finland, around the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. This contribution is a component of our work for the international Joint Research Project, Travelling TexTs. We concentrate on the presence of Nordic women’s writing in various languages in fin de siècle Finland by investigating a library collection from that time. We look at the complexities in the reception of Nordic women’s writing in translation in Finland, making use of the concept of the Nordic dimension of translation history, and introducing the notion of intranational reception. We emphasize the role of women translators as cultural transmitters, and the intertwining of national and transnational (or, even, in today’s terms, feminist) agendas. We also investigate the reception of Nordic women’s texts in the press of that time, by examining both literature written for adults and literature for girls. Working with large-scale digitized sources has enabled us to examine the question of reception broadly.