Cabins in Modern Norwegian Literature: Negotiating Place and Identity

This book examines the significance of cabins and other temporary seasonal dwellings as important symbols in modern Norwegian cultural and literary history. The author uses Michel Foucault’s notion of the “heterotopia”—an actual place that also functions imaginatively as a kind of real-world utopia—to examine how cabins have signified differently during successive periods, from an Enlightenment trope of simplicity and moderation, through the rise of tourism, into a period of increasing individualism and alienation from nature. For each period discussed, the author relates a widely recognized real world cabin to a cluster of thematically related literary texts from a wide variety of genres. Cabins in Modern Norwegian Literature considers both central canonical works, such as Camilla Collett’s The District Governor’s Daughters, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s Synnøve Solbakken, Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, and Knut Hamsun’s The Growth of the Soil, as well as less widely known literary works and texts from marginal genres such as hunting narratives and crime fiction. In addition, the book contains analyses of a few key films from the contemporary period that also activate the cabin as a motif. The central argument is that while Norwegians today tend to think of cabin culture as essentially unchanging over a long span of time, it has in fact changed dramatically over the past two hundred years, and that it is an extremely rich and complex cultural phenomenon deeply imbedded in the construction of national identity.

Table of Contents:
Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Seter as a Transgressive Allegorical Home 2. Cabin, Class, and Nation 3. The Hunter’s Cabin as Anti-Modern Retreat 4. The Golden Age of Cabin Therapy 5. The Post-Cabin in Late Modernity Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index About the Author

About the Author :
Ellen Rees is associate professor at the University of Oslo’s Centre for Ibsen Studies.

Review :
With Cabins in Modern Norwegian Literature, Ellen Rees offers a substantial addition to this developing area of inquiry. She has written a book that not only deals with a highly interesting place in Norwegian culture, but which is also accessible. Ree's book is structured in a synchronic and pedagogical way with ample recapitulation and comparison, guiding the reader through the history of the cabin. Accompanying Rees to the cabins of Norwegian literature is to embark on a journey that is inspiring and pleasurable alike. If place by definition is a 'meaningful location,' then Ellen Rees's investigation of the Norwegian cabin is an exemplary demonstration of how such meaning is produced. Tracing the literary and cultural history of this very Norwegian phenomenon from the eighteenth century up to the present, she uncovers the many layers of meaning attached to the cabin and manages to open up a rich array of significant cultural practices and discourses by way of this easily overlooked and pretty small piece of architecture. The ideas are many and well put throughout the book, but first of all it is this close inspection of a particular place of literature and of real life that distinguishes the book and gives it its proper place within the growing field of spatial humanities or place studies.