Reviewed by: Millennium—Nye retninger i nordisk litteratur ed. by Mads Bunch Marianne T. Stecher Millennium—Nye retninger i nordisk litteratur. Ed. Mads Bunch. Hellerup, Denmark: Forlaget Spring, 2013. Pp. 353. This new anthology of essays is a welcome and timely contribution to the field of Scandinavian literary studies that responds to the call to study the entire Nordic region. Over a dozen established Scandinavian scholars offer illuminating perspectives on the predominant new directions and central works that have emerged in the new millennium. As promised in the lucid introduction by editor Mads Bunch, the work delineates common tendencies in Nordic literature during this period (2000–2012) and also suggests important distinctions between the Nordic countries. The thirteen contributions consist of a mixture of literary historical surveys (within national or linguistic borders) and close readings that explore representative works in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, as well as in Finland-Swedish, Faeroese, Icelandic, and Danish-Greenlandic literature. The languages employed in the various contributions (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) reflect the intentional Nordic vision behind the project, although a contribution dedicated to recent Finnish literature is notably absent from the anthology and the contributions on Faeroese, Icelandic, and Greenlandic literature are offered by Danish scholars. Building on his study Samtidsbilleder—Realismen i yngre dansklitteratur 1994–2008 (Contemporary pictures—Realism in recent Danish Literature, 1994–2008, Dansklaererforeningen Forlag, 2009), which has been well received and widely circulated in Denmark, Mads Bunch opens the anthology with a succinct overview of global trends, “en række overordnede globale litterære tendenser” (p. 16) [a series of overriding global literary tendencies], evident in recent Nordic literature in three waves: first, socially and historically oriented realism, described here as a revolt against the postmodernism of the 1980s and 1990s; second, a renewed interest in history, family histories, and the past, especially “slægtsromaner” (generational novels) in which World War II forms a central nexus (Bunch notes this trend particularly in Denmark and Finland); third, autofiction or forms of literary “selvfremstillling” (self-representation), in which private/biographical material is staged as “reality-fiction” (e.g., Karl Ove Knausgård). Bunch demonstrates a firm grasp of contemporary literature and contextualizes literary tendencies effectively in the broader sphere of global developments and shifting human relations in the digital age. On the matter of distinctions between the Nordic countries, Bunch points to strong parallel developments in Denmark and Norway (albeit, with Norway’s much stronger success in the international markets with [End Page 243] figures such as Knausgård, Jon Fosse, and Jo Nesbø). In contrast, he finds in Sweden a more “heterogeneous” literature in the newly multicultural literary world, with writers such as Jonas Hassen Khemiri, and “de nye svenskere med arabisk baggrund, og specielt af deres børn” (p. 19) [the new Swedes with Arabic backgrounds and especially their children], who produce a “postcolonial” literature that Denmark, Norway, and Finland are only now beginning to evince. A further distinction, claims Bunch, is Sweden’s status as the “epicenter” for Nordic crime fiction, which dates to 1965 with Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s debut and continues with internationally recognized figures such as Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson. In his contribution about “individualiseringens veje” [the paths of individualization], Bunch argues effectively that the most recent prose trend (2005–2011) in Denmark reflects the postmodern consumer society of virtual (digital) relationships and reality-TV, in which we experience the most private (or intimate) spheres of life as the shared “universal” element; his reading of Kirsten Hammann, Se på mig (Gyldendal, 2011) demonstrates this point in relation to the banality and voyeurism of the reality-TV phenomenon. Among its many contributions, Millennium includes Claus Elholm Andersen’s excellent discussion of the contested reception history of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, that is, the conception of the author Larsson as either a cynical mainstream writer motivated by dreams of commercial success, or as an idealistic Swedish journalist critical of Sweden’s neo-liberal corporatism. Elholm Andersen proposes a different understanding of the global success of the trilogy by drawing attention to the previously overlooked intertextual play (with older English and American crime fiction novels) in Larsson’s novels, which challenges generic conventions “som den...