The national thought of the early nineteenth-century is foreign to our own idea of the nation in many respects. The purpose of this project has been to examine nationalism in Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish literature in the period 1830–1850. Literature provides a methodological advantage in acknowledging women as political actors, and in formulating foundational figures of thought and visions of the future, while simultaneously exposing its own conditions of possibility. The study of literature may thus bring forth complexities and surprising connections, such as magic and citizenship, which are hard to trace in other kinds of material. Nineteenth-century literature defamiliarizes nationalism.

Results
The most important conclusions pertain to three topics: the production of citizens, the significance of religious negotiations, and how literary genres formed national thought.

The project shows that the discussion and portrayal of citizenship was at the heart of national thought in Scandinavian literature during this period, when citizenship was not yet regulated by law. The Swedish novel of the 1840s promoted a nationalist understanding of the landscape – a cartographic project was executed: a realist description of the landscape was combined with a plot seeking out territorial borders that in turn instigate narratives of citizenship. The border either intensifies the nation’s promises to the citizen of life and community, or threatens life with wild nature or poor law enforcement and moral collapse. At the same time, the social order is described as an economic order, both in terms of how the order is administered, and in terms of marking a separate space, a market. The capitalist market, in which the novel itself takes part as a commodity, determines the prerequisites of how human relations are organized as measurable economic relations in the novel, as well as the prerequisites for portraying citizenship. The Swedish novel featured the commodity form as a basis for creating a national identity in the consumption of, for instance, flags or new editions of Old Norse literature, but people were also depicted according to a logic of commodity as fetishized surface, providing opportunities for the circulation of feelings. Étienne Balibar (1994, 2017) points out that the citizen subject is produced through the collective. J.L. Runeberg’s The Tales of Ensign Ståhl (1848) makes visible the ways in which the relation between private and collective, people and army, is regulated. The poems expose different ways of producing a male ‘citizen subject’ in interaction with the collective. The poems were published in peacetime, but the citizen is formed as a subject of patriotism at war.

Discussions on female citizenship across Scandinavia by both male and female authors complicate the understanding of citizenship. During the 1840s, both an older patriotic ideal of the ‘useful citizen’ and a modern, liberal idea of citizenship were actualized in the portrayal of women’s contribution to the nation. The female authors had in common, though, an idea of a moral citizenship. Modern feminist theory has apprehended the public sphere as the only way to emancipation, which has occluded older, radically feminist ideas of societal participation. To do justice to Fredrika Bremer’s distinction between private action on the one hand, and political on the other, it is insufficient to expand, as political scientist Ruth Lister (1997), the notion of citizenship to include status and practice. According to Bremer, the attitude towards the action is the determining criterion: if the mind is set only on the family or otherwise on public life. The liberal, moral citizenship acknowledged women’s work as independent, political contributions to the nation.

Religious negotiations were a real concern, since the nation was apprehended in relation to a Christian notion of evolution, whereas the roots of the nation were located in heathen times. The tension was further reinforced by vocational nationalism, the idea that the national people was chosen by God; for example Topelius and Grundtvig claimed that the Finnish and the Danish people respectively had a mission to safeguard Lutheranism against the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. The project has studied how these ideas resulted in anti-Catholicism in Bremer’s and Topelius’ styling of themselves as Protestant authors. The early nineteenth-century connection of aesthetics and politics is particularly prominent in their dismissal of a supposedly Catholic aesthetics, portrayed as anti-democratic. Still, their own literary and religious practices show a remarkable Catholic influence.

A great number of witches appear in Swedish and Finnish mid-nineteenth-century literature. In contrast to earlier and later periods, the witch gives voice to the history of the national people or its characteristics, to the heathen wisdom of nature leading in to the future, or, on the contrary, to a passed stage of the nation’s progress to Enlightenment. The witch was redefined from being in league with Satan, representing evil, to representing the nation. That transformation demanded a redistribution of emotions. In literature, this redistribution was performed by means of a shift in modes: Gothic traits were changed into sentimental and melodramatic modes.

The novel’s significance for the spread of nationalism has been discussed not least by Benedict Anderson (1983), who understands the ‘empty time’ of the realist novel as a prerequisite for the nation as an imagined community. Nevertheless, anti-realist genres were essential in arousing emotions for the nation. ‘Enchanting Nations’ has developed new insights into how anti-realist genre traits formed nationalist thought. The novel is a hybrid form, which allows for incorporating not only different genre traits, but also for remediating practically all other media forms of nationalist pedagogy. Bremer’s novel Life in Dalecarlia (1845) is one example of how the depiction of the common people was combined with Gothic traits: the nation is written through different methods of producing meaning, both of which can be connected to a market-based identity model where outward appearances hide a lost origin. The common people in the novel are never seen to work, but are rather put on display in groups and processions like mass-produced, identically packed objects, passing by on the belt. The Gothic characters, on the other hand, appear impermeable and hard to decipher, yet evasive. They expose the fluctuating quality of the exchange value. Ethnographic collections of oral tradition, national historiography and editions of medieval manuscripts are other examples of nationalist pedagogy, charged with emotions in the novel form. Traits of melodrama, the Gothic novel, and allegory allow for feelings to stick to the nationalist project, and these genres all refer to a supernatural reality and a transcendent temporality. Contrary to Anderson, ‘Enchanting Nations’ shows that a temporality characterized by prefiguration was a prerequisite for the circulation of nationalist emotions.

New research questions have been generated by the project, especially in relation to the history of emotions. In March 2018, Anna Bohlin and Katarina Leppänen organized an international colloquium (funded by RJ’s grant for research initiation) on how different emotions constructed ideas of loss in nineteenth-century nationalisms in the Baltic Sea region. The proposal for a conference volume has been accepted by Brill.

During the nineteenth century the national landscape became holy – an idea that in its secularized form would drive out the mass armies of the First World War. ‘Enchanting Nations’ has initiated an investigation into the sacralisation of the national territory by an analysis of how heaven and earth are connected by bodily fluids in early texts by Wergeland and Almqvist. Anna Bohlin is cooperating with art historian Tonje H. Sørensen in organising a colloquium in order to develop a cross-disciplinary study of how the land became holy.

Dissemination of results
The project has led to extensive national and international contacts and cooperation. Results have been presented at national and international conferences at Stockholm University, in Sydney, Australia, at Lund University, at Schæffergården, Denmark, at UCLA, USA, Universiteit van Amsterdam, l’Université de Strasbourg, Háskóli Íslands, Reykjavík, and Høgskulen i Volda, Norway. Research results have been communicated to the public in a newspaper article, a popular article in a publication issued by the Swedish Church, in lectures at the Swedish Institute, Stockholm, the Carl Larsson home in Sundborn, the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki, and at a panel discussion at the National Museum, Stockholm.

Results have also been disseminated through teaching. Caroline Haux has designed a course at Stockholm University, and Anna Bohlin has developed a course at the University of Bergen, which also generated a master thesis on national thought in Camilla Collett’s work.

We have had the privilege to discuss the project at research seminars at the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh, Berlin, Helsinki, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Uppsala, Oslo, and Bergen. The project has furthermore organized a cross-disciplinary colloquium together with colleagues from the History of Religion at Stockholm University, and a cross-disciplinary colloquium with participants from all five Nordic countries at the University of Bergen, ‘Nation as Quality: Nineteenth-Century Literary Public Spheres and Peoples in the Nordic Countries’. Publication support for the conference volume has been granted by RJ. Caroline Haux has, through contact with Prof. Em. Paul Patton, been offered a place as a ‘visiting fellow’ for a research semester at Flinders University in Adelaide. Anna Bohlin has through the project built an international network, manifested in the three anthologies of which she is the editor.