The Economy of National Feeling. Citizenship, Market, Biopolitics in Scandinavian nineteenth Century Novel
The significance of the Swedish nineteenth-century novel in the building of the nation and in the making of modern life is huge. It drew up borders to the country, made family life intimate and loving, inspired feelings for the homeland, expelled the foreign and the divergent, and made consumption a necessity for happiness. In short, the nineteenth-century novel helped to organise the population and to institute social order. The Economy of National Feeling: Citizenship, Marketplace, and Biopolitics in Nineteenth-Century Scandinavian Literature project aims to show how literature – particularly the novel – quite literally not only made citizens but also organized life, pointing to how literature at the time formed part of a biopolitics. Instead of reading the novels as containers for ideas and ideologies, the project will look upon them as forms of writing practices through which a citizen subject is construed. The project will display how novels, to produce reading citizens, had to stage social order in the form of an economy in which market relations prevailed. The citizen subject – whether the reader or a featured character – thereby gained traits of a homo economicus.
Situating nineteenth-century Swedish novels in their economic and political conditions of possibility defamiliarises present forms of nationalism and concepts of the nation, undermining the arguments of today’s nationalist movements.
Final report
The project “The Economy of National Feeling: Citizenship, Marketplace, and Biopolitics in Nineteenth-Century Scandinavian Literature” has resulted in a monograph which will be published by Makadam during 2025. Five peer-reviewed articles (Open Access) on
nationalism, citizenship and commodity market in Scandinavian literature which has been published in national (2) and international (3) journals, has together with a new chapter and an introduction been revised and reorganized into a whole. Chapter six is the result of new research during my Sabbatical, including my time at Oxford University, where I spent a semester (Trinity term), Spring 2024.
The project lay bare the importance of the Swedish 19th century novel in building the nation and organising life, pointing to how literature at the time formed part of a biopolitics. The novel drew up borders to the country, made family life intimate and loving, inspired feelings for the homeland, expelled the foreign and the divergent, and made consumption a necessity for happiness. In short, the nineteenth-century novel helped to organise the population and to institute social order. The project also shows how novels, to produce reading citizens, had to stage social order in the form of an economy in which market relations prevailed. The citizen subject – whether the reader or a featured character – thereby gained traits of a homo economicus.
It is particularly biopolitics which has been given greater emphases in the volume than in earlier articles. Foucault’s view of liberalism as a new type of power that succeeds sovereign power is a template. Society is the target of a permanent governmental intervention not to restrict liberties but to produce and guarantee them. The result of liberal government is the kind of subject produced: the freedom of the subject presupposes self-regulation (Foucault 2010). This project assumes that novels produce such subjects. Instead of reading the novels as containers for ideas and ideologies, the project considers them as forms of writing practices through which a ‘citizen subject’ is construed. After the loss of Finland 1809, it is particularly important to close the boundaries on what is Swedish, and define Swedishness as well. As an effect a kind of colonisation of the country takes place with establishing borders towards the Finnish, but also towards the Norwegian, despite of a forced union and a “common” identity policy. With an incipient democratisation (1809 was also the year of the governmental form that changed the system of governing, dissolved autocracy and increased the division of power), population growth, urbanisation, and proletarisation as well, it is of importance who can be classified as citizens and legal subjects. Both inclusive and exclusive practises are required as displacements and uncertainties emerge in boundaries between people. The project claims that the role of the early 19th century novel was prominent in that work, particularly novels where the family was the focus. Under the influence of the nation form (Balibar, 2004) there is a nationalisation of human relations in the private sphere – notably of family relations. The relationship between the individuals is charged with a civic function. Conversely, national community is created in an identification with a (symbolic) kinship. The last chapter in particular shows how the novel participates in regulating these relations.
Situating nineteenth-century Swedish novels in their economic and political conditions of possibility defamiliarizes present forms of nationalism and concepts of the nation, undermining the arguments of today’s nationalist movements.
Chapter 1 shows how Emilie Flygare-Carlén in The rose of Thistle Island (Rosen på Tistelön) (1842) in her depiction of the dramatic war between smugglers and customs officers on the seaboard in fact discusses the relation between state and individual and questions of citizenship and local identity. State control, which in the novel is manifested in the local representatives of the customs and police, is opposed by the resistance of a clan-like border population. The chapter also shows how in the novel a political relation where power and resistance are at stake is written as an exchange of commodities and bodies in an economy.
Chapter 2 analyses Fredrika Bremer’s novel In Dalecarlia (I Dalarna) (1845) as a national novel: a novel which sees its task as providing information about who the nation’s people are, what population groups it contains and how the nation arose and developed. The chapter discusses how mode of writing and genre features – gothic and ideal realistic depiction of folk life – both complement each other and compete for dominance at different levels in the text, both in terms of form and content. Hereby I examine how these text types produce, but also problematize, national identity on their own particular terms and in relation to each other.
Chapter 3 examines subjectivity, biopower and consumption patterns in Fredrika Bremer’s The Neighbours (Grannarne) (1837) and Flygare Carlén’s The Rose of Thistle Island (1842). Here I address how the individual is shaped in a liberal economy, and argue that the liberal subject is constituted as a citizen subject by being given concrete form in a narrative about the individual’s relation to the collective. Using Étienne Balibar’s discussion on the citizen subject as a starting point, the individual is examined in relation to social community (neighbourhood, fishing community, nation).
Chapter 4 adopts a transnational perspective in the analyses of three poems from Johan Ludvig Runeberg’s Fänrik ståhls sägner (1848) to examine power relations and point to a politically conditioned hybrid authorial position. When the poems are placed in juxtaposition to each other, it becomes visible how the poems both conceal, and reveal how the relationship between individual and collective, “free people” and army, is regulated in a power order. The question how war is waged to inspire nationalism permeates the analysis. Thus, the poems reveal how the male citizen subject is formed, which as Étienne Balibar (2017) argues, is the foundation of modern subjectivity.
Chapter 5 analyses three epistolary novels, Sophie von Knorring’s Illusions (1836), Bremer’s Grannarne (1837), Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s Araminta May (1838) as devises for the production of gendered subjects in an economy of power and desire. By linking the genre to the liberal economy and its role in creating female citizens, a new perspective is given on the epistolary (novel) form as a biopolitical practice. Where previous research (f. ex. Leffler 2013) examines representational techniques in the epistolary novel as a way of creating illusionary effects, the chapter highlights the political dimension of such formal strategies.
Chapter 6 (which also functions as a concluding text) shows how representations of the family in the novels I have investigated is functioning as a central aspect of population policy and strategic political intervention. The family is investigated as a mediator between the individual and the nation. Being both a biological and a social unity – as well as sustaining ideological and biological (re)production (nativity, subjectivation) – the family is a site where living bodies are institutionalised into societal roles. The early nineteenth century family novel is analysed as an apparatus for the management and distribution of the national population (Agamben 2009).
Within the framework of the topic of my project, I have participated at the TFL-days (28, 29 November 2024, Stockholm University) with a paper: “Who gets to have children? Citizenship and reproduction in the Swedish 19th century novel”. The lecture was revised into an article in the conference volume in Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, TFL, Vol 54 No 3–4 (2024).
During my semester as a Visiting fellow at Oxford University, I contributed to the seminar culture at the higher seminar for Victorian studies and received productive insights and ideas for my research in conversations with professors (Hellen Small, Elisabeth Shuttleworth) and doctoral students, as well as valuable contacts.
New research questions have arisen during my Sabbatical, which I partly explore in the new chapter and in my paper at the TFL days. The focus is here how the novel writes genealogy in relation to biopolitics. I plan to explore the topic in my upcoming research project.
The research results have been spread/circulated through the TFL-days with participants/researchers from different universities in Sweden and Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, TFL, Open Access. The Monograph will be published (Open Access) and be sold in book stores, and hopefully be distributed to libraries.
Publications:
Monograph:
”The Economy of National Feeling. Citizenship, market place, biopolitics in Scandinavian 19th century Literature” (Open Access)
(Not yet published)
Article in conference volume:
”Who gets to have children. Citizenship and reproduction in the Swedish 19th Century Novel” Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, TFL, Vol 54 Nr 3–4 (2024).
(Not yet published)
nationalism, citizenship and commodity market in Scandinavian literature which has been published in national (2) and international (3) journals, has together with a new chapter and an introduction been revised and reorganized into a whole. Chapter six is the result of new research during my Sabbatical, including my time at Oxford University, where I spent a semester (Trinity term), Spring 2024.
The project lay bare the importance of the Swedish 19th century novel in building the nation and organising life, pointing to how literature at the time formed part of a biopolitics. The novel drew up borders to the country, made family life intimate and loving, inspired feelings for the homeland, expelled the foreign and the divergent, and made consumption a necessity for happiness. In short, the nineteenth-century novel helped to organise the population and to institute social order. The project also shows how novels, to produce reading citizens, had to stage social order in the form of an economy in which market relations prevailed. The citizen subject – whether the reader or a featured character – thereby gained traits of a homo economicus.
It is particularly biopolitics which has been given greater emphases in the volume than in earlier articles. Foucault’s view of liberalism as a new type of power that succeeds sovereign power is a template. Society is the target of a permanent governmental intervention not to restrict liberties but to produce and guarantee them. The result of liberal government is the kind of subject produced: the freedom of the subject presupposes self-regulation (Foucault 2010). This project assumes that novels produce such subjects. Instead of reading the novels as containers for ideas and ideologies, the project considers them as forms of writing practices through which a ‘citizen subject’ is construed. After the loss of Finland 1809, it is particularly important to close the boundaries on what is Swedish, and define Swedishness as well. As an effect a kind of colonisation of the country takes place with establishing borders towards the Finnish, but also towards the Norwegian, despite of a forced union and a “common” identity policy. With an incipient democratisation (1809 was also the year of the governmental form that changed the system of governing, dissolved autocracy and increased the division of power), population growth, urbanisation, and proletarisation as well, it is of importance who can be classified as citizens and legal subjects. Both inclusive and exclusive practises are required as displacements and uncertainties emerge in boundaries between people. The project claims that the role of the early 19th century novel was prominent in that work, particularly novels where the family was the focus. Under the influence of the nation form (Balibar, 2004) there is a nationalisation of human relations in the private sphere – notably of family relations. The relationship between the individuals is charged with a civic function. Conversely, national community is created in an identification with a (symbolic) kinship. The last chapter in particular shows how the novel participates in regulating these relations.
Situating nineteenth-century Swedish novels in their economic and political conditions of possibility defamiliarizes present forms of nationalism and concepts of the nation, undermining the arguments of today’s nationalist movements.
Chapter 1 shows how Emilie Flygare-Carlén in The rose of Thistle Island (Rosen på Tistelön) (1842) in her depiction of the dramatic war between smugglers and customs officers on the seaboard in fact discusses the relation between state and individual and questions of citizenship and local identity. State control, which in the novel is manifested in the local representatives of the customs and police, is opposed by the resistance of a clan-like border population. The chapter also shows how in the novel a political relation where power and resistance are at stake is written as an exchange of commodities and bodies in an economy.
Chapter 2 analyses Fredrika Bremer’s novel In Dalecarlia (I Dalarna) (1845) as a national novel: a novel which sees its task as providing information about who the nation’s people are, what population groups it contains and how the nation arose and developed. The chapter discusses how mode of writing and genre features – gothic and ideal realistic depiction of folk life – both complement each other and compete for dominance at different levels in the text, both in terms of form and content. Hereby I examine how these text types produce, but also problematize, national identity on their own particular terms and in relation to each other.
Chapter 3 examines subjectivity, biopower and consumption patterns in Fredrika Bremer’s The Neighbours (Grannarne) (1837) and Flygare Carlén’s The Rose of Thistle Island (1842). Here I address how the individual is shaped in a liberal economy, and argue that the liberal subject is constituted as a citizen subject by being given concrete form in a narrative about the individual’s relation to the collective. Using Étienne Balibar’s discussion on the citizen subject as a starting point, the individual is examined in relation to social community (neighbourhood, fishing community, nation).
Chapter 4 adopts a transnational perspective in the analyses of three poems from Johan Ludvig Runeberg’s Fänrik ståhls sägner (1848) to examine power relations and point to a politically conditioned hybrid authorial position. When the poems are placed in juxtaposition to each other, it becomes visible how the poems both conceal, and reveal how the relationship between individual and collective, “free people” and army, is regulated in a power order. The question how war is waged to inspire nationalism permeates the analysis. Thus, the poems reveal how the male citizen subject is formed, which as Étienne Balibar (2017) argues, is the foundation of modern subjectivity.
Chapter 5 analyses three epistolary novels, Sophie von Knorring’s Illusions (1836), Bremer’s Grannarne (1837), Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s Araminta May (1838) as devises for the production of gendered subjects in an economy of power and desire. By linking the genre to the liberal economy and its role in creating female citizens, a new perspective is given on the epistolary (novel) form as a biopolitical practice. Where previous research (f. ex. Leffler 2013) examines representational techniques in the epistolary novel as a way of creating illusionary effects, the chapter highlights the political dimension of such formal strategies.
Chapter 6 (which also functions as a concluding text) shows how representations of the family in the novels I have investigated is functioning as a central aspect of population policy and strategic political intervention. The family is investigated as a mediator between the individual and the nation. Being both a biological and a social unity – as well as sustaining ideological and biological (re)production (nativity, subjectivation) – the family is a site where living bodies are institutionalised into societal roles. The early nineteenth century family novel is analysed as an apparatus for the management and distribution of the national population (Agamben 2009).
Within the framework of the topic of my project, I have participated at the TFL-days (28, 29 November 2024, Stockholm University) with a paper: “Who gets to have children? Citizenship and reproduction in the Swedish 19th century novel”. The lecture was revised into an article in the conference volume in Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, TFL, Vol 54 No 3–4 (2024).
During my semester as a Visiting fellow at Oxford University, I contributed to the seminar culture at the higher seminar for Victorian studies and received productive insights and ideas for my research in conversations with professors (Hellen Small, Elisabeth Shuttleworth) and doctoral students, as well as valuable contacts.
New research questions have arisen during my Sabbatical, which I partly explore in the new chapter and in my paper at the TFL days. The focus is here how the novel writes genealogy in relation to biopolitics. I plan to explore the topic in my upcoming research project.
The research results have been spread/circulated through the TFL-days with participants/researchers from different universities in Sweden and Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, TFL, Open Access. The Monograph will be published (Open Access) and be sold in book stores, and hopefully be distributed to libraries.
Publications:
Monograph:
”The Economy of National Feeling. Citizenship, market place, biopolitics in Scandinavian 19th century Literature” (Open Access)
(Not yet published)
Article in conference volume:
”Who gets to have children. Citizenship and reproduction in the Swedish 19th Century Novel” Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, TFL, Vol 54 Nr 3–4 (2024).
(Not yet published)