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Rethinking National
Literatures
and the Literary Canon
in Scandinavia
Edited by

Heidi Grönstrand, Dag Heede,

Anne Heith and Ann-Sofie Lönngren
Rethinking National Literatures and the Literary Canon in Scandinavia

Edited by Heidi Grönstrand, Dag Heede, Anne Heith

and Ann-Sofie Lönngren

This book first published 2015

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2015 by Heidi Grönstrand, Dag Heede, Anne Heith,

Ann-Sofie Lönngren and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-7838-3

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7838-8
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. viii

Editors’ Introduction .................................................................................. ix

Part I: Key Concepts and Theoretical Reflections

National, Transnational and Entangled Literatures: Methodological

Considerations Focusing on the Case of Finland......................................... 2
Mikko Pollari, Hanna-Leena Nissilä, Kukku Melkas, Olli Löytty,
Ralf Kauranen and Heidi Grönstrand

Challenging the Bodies and Borders of Literature in Scandinavia:

Methodological Nationalism, Intersectionality and Methodological
Disciplinarity ............................................................................................. 30
Annika Olsson

Immigrant Literature in Finland: The Uses of a Literary Category ........... 52

Olli Löytty

Part II: Rethinking Language, Literature and National Belonging

Sophie Elkan’s Ambiguous Dream of the Orient: On Cultural Identity

and the National Literary Canon................................................................ 78
Helena Bodin

Reindeer and Yoik Revisited: Traditional Sámi Features in Contemporary

Sámi Poetry ............................................................................................. 104
Kaisa Ahvenjärvi

Religion and Revolt in Colonial Scandinavia: Postcolonial Representations

in Three Novels ....................................................................................... 130
Margareta Petersson
vi Table of Contents

Part III: Queering the “Nordic”

A Gay History of Nordic Literature: Reflections on a Future Project ..... 158

Dag Heede

Cross-Dressing Mysteries and Monsters: Nineteenth- and Twenty-First-

Century Cross-Dressers in Swedish Suspense Fiction............................. 181
Moa Sam Holmqvist

Trolls!! Folklore, Literature and “Othering” in the Nordic Countries ..... 205
Ann-Sofie Lönngren

Index ........................................................................................................ 231

 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover
The Dove. Nr. 12. Hilma af Klint. 1915. Public domain.

Chapter One
Still Life. David Teniers the Younger, c. 1645–1650. Royal Museums of
Fine Arts, Belgium. Public domain.

Chapter Four
All images are from the book Drömmen om Österlandet. Sophie Elkan.
1901. Public domain.

Chapter Six
Berømte danske Mænd og Kvinder. Hans Egede, J. P. Trap. 1868. Public
domain.

Thule Greenlanders Whaling. Hans Egede. Eighteenth century. Public

domain.

FÆROARUM. Faroe map. Lucas Debes. 1873. Public domain.

The village of Kautokeino. A. F. Skjöldebrand. 1799. Public domain.

Pastor Læstadius preaching to the Sami. Auguste François Biard. 1840.

Public domain.

Stamp of the Faroe Islands. William Heinesen. 1988. Public domain.

Chapter Nine
Askeladden. Theodor Kittelsen. 1884. Public domain.

Illustration of Walter Stenström’s The boy and the trolls or The Adventure,
in the children’s anthology Among pixies and trolls. John Bauer. 1915.
Public domain.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editorial group would like to thank Satu Gröndahl, Vuokko Hirvonen
and all the other members of the DINO network for their steadfast support
during the years in which this anthology was completed. We would also
like to thank The Hugo Valentin Centre and the Centre for Gender
Research, both at Uppsala University, for invaluable generosity and
hospitality. Anna Samuelsson, thank you for introducing us to Hilma af
Klint (1862–1944), the painter of the image that is on the cover of this
book.

Ann-Sofie Lönngren, Uppsala

Heidi Grönstrand, Turku
Dag Heede, Odense
Anne Heith, Umeå

June, 23, 2015

 EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

What do we associate with the term ‘Nordic’? Vikings, reindeers, polar

bears, Sámi, Old Norse mythology, or maybe Hans Christian Andersen,
the Nobel Prize, Nokia, Abba, and Björk? The definition of ‘Nordic’
changes constantly, and the fundaments for this imagined community are
consequently often questioned. As a consequence of global as well as local
developments and reorganizations, these discussions have intensified over
the past ten to twenty years. In this collection, Rethinking National
Literatures and the Literary Canon in Scandinavia, we want to highlight
the question of the Nordic in relation to the field of literary studies.

The societal and political developments of the past decades – in the Nordic
countries and beyond – have resulted in a simultaneous questioning of the
established ways of looking at literature, and, for example, the ways in
which genres and literary periodisations have been constructed. There has
been an increasing appearance of “new” literatures constructed around
language, ethnicity, sexuality, gender and social class. These “alternative”
literatures, often categorized as, for example, migratory, minority, and
queer literatures, have an ongoing impact on that which usually counts as
Nordic literature, the literary canon, the literary establishment, and the
(post)modern societies in this geographic region. Most generally, we aim
to discuss the role literature plays in the building of national identities in
the Nordic nation-states, particularly the historical contexts to this
development. Moreover, we discuss the constructions and consequences of
national literary canons, currently challenged by different critical
perspectives such as postcolonial, gender and queer theories as well as
indigenous and ethnic literary studies. What potential does a plurality of
perspectives in literary studies have to question the very concepts of
literary canon, canon formations, national self-understanding and national
identity?

This three-part anthology is made up of a selection of articles representing

a variety of angles in this area of research. In the first part, “Key Concepts
and Theoretical Reflections”, the focus is on methodological perspectives.
It begins with the article “National, transnational and entangled literatures.
Methodological considerations focusing on the case of Finland”, in which
x Editors’ Introduction

Mikko Pollari, Hanna-Leena Nissilä, Kukku Melkas, Olli Löytty, Ralf

Kauranen and Heidi Grönstrand take a critical view on the understanding
of the nation-state and its consequences for literary studies. While the
starting point of the discussion is the critique of methodological
nationalism, most of the attention focuses on the concept of the
transnational and its benefits and possibilities in analysing the literary
field. Finally, the article suggests that in order to highlight the importance
of other relevant categories or networks than those with implicit
connections to the nation, the term “entanglement” could be useful for the
study of literature.

This discussion is followed by “Challenging the Bodies and Borders of

Literature in Scandinavia: Methodological Nationalism, Intersectionality
and Methodological Disciplinarity” by Annika Olsson. Here, Olsson
addresses the questions of methodological nationalism by examining
literary histories and the ways in which nations and national borders are
understood in the formation of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish
literatures. Olsson shows how these questions are related to scientific and
democratic problems: Research is fixed, not only within national borders
but also within disciplinary borders. And this methodological
disciplinarity needs to be addressed.

The first section of the anthology ends with a discussion concerning the
problems of categorization. In the article “Immigrant Literature in Finland.
The Uses of a Literary Category”, Olli Löytty focuses on two aspects
embedded in the term “immigrant literature”, namely, the alleged newness
of the literature written by authors who come from immigrant backgrounds
as well as the frame of interpretation that follows when this literature is
understood as new. Löytty demonstrates the limits and weaknesses of this
widely used term and, in the end, states that without at least a reflexive
approach, the interpretations inevitably produce predetermined results that
merely repeat the presumptions embedded in the concepts of “immigrant
literature”, “migrant literature” and “multicultural literature”.

The second section of the book is called “Re-Thinking Language,

Literature and National Belonging”. It begins with Helena Bodin’s article,
“Sophie Elkan’s Ambiguous Dream of the Orient. On Cultural Identity
and the National Literary Canon”, in which an understanding of the
literary canon is proposed as a kind of cultural, collective memory.
Studying the formation of a Nordic literary canon from a cultural semiotic
perspective as presented by Yuri M. Lotman and others, she focuses on the
 Rethinking National Literatures and the Literary Canon in Scandinavia xi

ways in which Swedish identity, Western identity and self-understanding

are enacted and problematized in several works by the Swedish writer
Sophie Elkan (1853–1921). In accordance with cultural semiotics, Bodin
states that challenging stories like these, stories which stage cultural
clashes, cultural misunderstandings and cultural differences are essential
to all national literatures, their canons and the cultural identities they
foster. Thus, these stories need to be narrated, discussed and interpreted.

In the second article in this section, “Reindeer and Yoik Revisited:

Traditional Sámi Features in Contemporary Sámi Poetry”, Kaisa
Ahvenjärvi discusses the theme of Sámi identity formation from the
vantage point of lyrical texts by Sámi women poets Rawdna Carita Eira
and Hege Siri. She explores how the poets use and renew the traditional
ethnic symbolism of the figure of the reindeer, Sámi language, and yoik (a
traditional form of chanting), all of which today function as identity
markers in Sámi cultural mobilization. The employment and renewal of
these aspects mean that their texts, Ahvenjärvi suggests, come across as
parts of an intertextual dialogue with other contemporary Sámi poets.

The section ends with Margareta Petersson’s contribution to this anthology,

“Religion and Revolt in Colonial Scandinavia: Post-Colonial
Representations in Three Novels”. Here, Petersson presents an analysis of
Faroese writer William Heinesen’s novel The Good Hope, Danish Kim
Leine’s The Prophets of Eternal Fjord set in Greenland, and Norwegian
Hanne Ørstavik’s The Pastor set in northern Norway, in the region that
traditionally has been the homeland of the Sámi people. Petersson wishes
to contribute to the current debate on Scandinavian exceptionalism by
drawing attention to literary representations that undermine ideas of
colonialism as a civilizing mission and, at the same time, explore the
suppressed voices of the colonized native inhabitants. The analysis is
inspired by perspectives from postcolonial studies, particularly from the
branch that during recent years has highlighted how the Nordic countries
were part of colonizing endeavours and practices.

In the last part of the book, we let three literary scholars make attempts at
“Queering the Nordic”, starting with Dag Heede’s essay, “A Gay History
of Nordic Literature: Reflections on a Future Project”. This essay gives a
necessarily incomplete overview of the present state of Nordic gay and
queer literary scholarship and outlines an ambitious pioneering project
concerning a new Nordic queer literary history. This contains both an
overview of existing gay literature but also important attempts at queering
the national canons of all the Nordic countries and regions. Moreover, the
xii Editors’ Introduction

article argues that the term “gay” is neither anachronistic nor outdated but
still useful in the documentation of hidden and/or forgotten texts written
by gay writers or in dealing with homosexual or queer themes. Thus, this
future history contains both immersions in literary archives and also
theoretically sophisticated attempts at further queering canonized texts in
the Nordic region.

Moa Sam Holmqvist’s pioneering essay, “Cross-Dressing, Mysteries and

Monsters. Nineteenth- and Twenty-First-Century Cross-Dressers in
Swedish Suspense Fiction”, can be read as an early chapter in the above-
mentioned endeavour, highlighting a seldom-discussed theme in Swedish
literature. Spanning three centuries, Holmqvist analyses how the theme of
cross-dressing has undergone fundamental and important changes in
literary plots in popular culture. Historically, cross-dressing was often vital
in creating twists or suspense in mysteries, but as a result of the new
connections between cross-dressing, homosexuality, perversion and
mental illness made by sexology at the turn of the twentieth century, cross-
dressing motifs in Swedish suspense fiction took on new meanings.
Today, in contemporary Swedish literature, these motifs no longer seem to
be employed to create mystery, but, rather, to identify the cross-dresser as
either pathetic or deceptive – or both.

Finally, Ann-Sofie Lönngren contributes with the article “Trolls!!

Folklore, Literature and ‘Othering’ in the Nordic Countries”. Comparing
the nature and function of the troll figure in three contemporary fictional
texts written in Denmark, Sweden and Finland, she argues that the re-
employment of old folkloristic beliefs regarding trolls can be understood
in light of a postcolonial world order, the development of the Nordic
welfare states in the twentieth century, and modern Western standards
relating to gender and sexuality. Ultimately, this figure challenges the
Enlightenment concept of the human as a stable entity that is once and for
all established by pointing instead to posthumanist processes of
qualification. Finally, Lönngren predicts a “troll turn” in Nordic literature,
in which this figure is further used to enlighten, establish, undermine and
subvert age-old notions of a “true” Nordic people.

The editors of this volume, who are all literary scholars from Sweden,
Finland and Denmark, hope that these explorations will help stimulate
reflections on the concepts of power, nationality, language and literature
within and outside the Nordic region. Moreover, we hope to challenge
borders concerning genres, canons, concepts and definitions and invite
changes in the ways we perceive identity and belonging in a globalized
 Rethinking National Literatures and the Literary Canon in Scandinavia xiii

world, with new ways of interpreting the “human” as well as the

relationship between wo/man.

Ann-Sofie Lönngren (Uppsala University, Sweden)

Anne Heith (Umeå University, Sweden)
Heidi Grönstrand (University of Turku, Finland)
Dag Heede (University of Southern Denmark, Denmark)
 PART I:

KEY CONCEPTS AND THEORETICAL

REFLECTIONS
 NATIONAL, TRANSNATIONAL
AND ENTANGLED LITERATURES:
METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
FOCUSING ON THE CASE OF FINLAND

MIKKO POLLARI, HANNA-LEENA NISSILÄ,

KUKKU MELKAS, OLLI LÖYTTY,
RALF KAURANEN AND HEIDI GRÖNSTRAND

Abstract: This article scrutinises the benefits of and possibilities raised by

three broadly defined conceptual lenses through which literature’s
embeddedness in a world marked by transnational relations and
connections can be analysed: the national, the transnational and finally, the
entangled. To illustrate the different perspectives, a number of empirical
examples, stemming mostly from the Finnish, or, to be more precise, the
transnational-Finnish, literary field are presented. The article shows that
whereas the application of the transnational and even the national lens
have clear benefits for answering questions of literary research, both
perspectives centre, albeit in very different ways, on the category of the
nation. In this context the concept of entanglement liberates analysis from
the national category on the level of explicit discourse whilst not
excluding it from scrutiny. Entanglement as a concept proposes that the
national category and transnational networks can be studied in relation to
other categories and networks forming the literary field and its various
components, from texts to authors and institutions. The “entanglement
approach” to literature not only deconstructs the relationship between
literature – or any cultural texts, for that matter – and the national order of
the world but also reaches beyond the binarism of nationalism and
transnationalism.

Keywords: methodological nationalism, transnationalism, entanglements,

literary studies, Finland
 Pollari, Nissilä, Melkas, Löytty, Kauranen and Grönstrand 3

Transnational Literature1, The Location of Transnational Literature2,

Contemporary Transnational Literature3, Transnational Women’s Literature
in Europe4, TRANS (The Centre for Transnational Literary and Cultural
Studies)5, Beyond Boundaries: Transnational and Transcultural Literature
and Practice 6 , Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American
Literature7,...and so forth.

This brief selection of titles, comprised of an e-journal, two conferences, a

course, a research centre, a dissertation, and a book series, listed above
stands as a testament to the overwhelming interest in things transnational
within the study of literature at the moment. This shift in focus, dubbed
“the transnational turn in literary studies” by Paul Jay (2010), signifies a
change in which methodological nationalism – the nation and the nation-
state as a way of delimiting the analysis of literature – has become widely
challenged. The rise of postcolonial studies, border studies, diaspora
studies, cosmopolitanism and globalization alongside feminism and the
discourse of multiculturalism have provided new perspectives and played
a role in shifting literary studies beyond the national frame. All of these
have resulted in renewed ways of connecting and positing literature in the
world. And truly, the interconnectedness, fluidity and mobility of
phenomena over national borders have in recent years together been
accepted as something of a new paradigm in the study of literature, as well
as within the humanities and social sciences in general.

Analyzing literature from a genuinely post-national perspective may

require new or at least reformulated concepts (Seyhan 2001), and indeed,
the critique and abandonment of methodological nationalism has led to
attempts at new formulations. Instead of defining their object of study as
fitting into neat, fixed categories such as “national literatures”, scholars

1
E-journal, http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/.
2
Conference in Toronto, Canada, April 2013, http://www.acla.org/acla2013/the-
location-of-transnational-literature/.
3
Course at Columbia University, New York, the United States,
http://english.columbia.edu/contemporary-transnational-literature.
4
Conference in Budapest, Hungary in May 2013 (http://femtranslit.eu/).
5
A collaborative interdisciplinary research centre, University of Surrey, UK,
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/englishandlanguages/research/TRANS%20Research%20
Centre/).
6
Dissertation by Maria-Theresia Holub, State University of New York at
Binghampton, 2007.
7
Book series, Routledge: http://www.routledge.com/books/series/SE0701/.
4 National, Transnational and Entangled Literatures

now describe it by adding prefixes such as “cross-border”, “entangled”,

“shared”, and “transnational”. Of these, “transnational” has attained the
status of a keyword, bringing together like-minded scholars from different
fields. Judging from the popularity of the concept, literary and cultural
scholars alike (as well as many others) seem to have a need to replace
methodological nationalism with something that might be called
methodological transnationalism.

The phrase “transnational turn” implies a paradigmatic shift in the

theorizing of literature. A “shift” and a “turn” furthermore suggest the
existence of an evolution in scientific reasoning, an idea that research over
time becomes more up-to-date and more enlightened. Consequently,
previous research comes to seem lacking, inadequate or even faulty in its
focus, problematisations or conclusions. This is more or less a
consequence of the rhetoric of how new ideas and perspectives are
proposed in scholarly discourse. Nevertheless, a perspective sensitive to
transnational connections must not underestimate the significance of the
national framework or the nation state when describing the dynamics of
literature as a cultural and societal phenomenon (e.g. Amelina et al. 2012,
3–4).

In the following, we will continue the discussion on transnationalism,

nationalism and literature. We posit ourselves amidst the transnational turn,
but want to further develop the theoretical-methodological framework for
understanding literature in this context. We will scrutinize the benefits and
possibilities of three broadly defined conceptual lenses through which
literature’s embeddedness in a world marked by transnational relations and
connections can be analyzed: the national, the transnational and finally, the
entangled. In terms of developmental thinking, this would suggest the kind
of evolution described above, where nationalism as a framework for
research would present itself as obsolete, transnationalism as a halfway
position, and a perspective highlighting various entanglements as the end
of a trajectory of development. However, we will try to avoid this
description, which owes much to the literary conventions of the
Bildungsroman or coming-of-age story, by focusing expressly on the
productive aspects of each “phase” or line of thinking and showing the
ways they are intertwined. Still, on a more conventional note our mapping
of these perspectives will begin with a focus on the critique of
methodological nationalism.
 Pollari, Nissilä, Melkas, Löytty, Kauranen and Grönstrand 5

To illustrate the different perspectives, we present a number of various

empirical examples stemming mostly from the Finnish, or, to be more
precise, the transnational-Finnish literary field. In the next section, we will
give a brief introduction to the critique of methodological nationalism,
demonstrating how a methodologically nationalistic approach is indeed an
inadequate way of examining literature, and then, in something of an
about-face, argue that even after a transnational turn, the national category
may still be relevant and useful in the study of literature. From there, we
move on to the concept of the transnational, appraising the way it has thus
far been utilized in the study of literature and pondering its potential and
limitations. In the fourth section, we deal with the concept of
entanglements, its relationship with the transnational and its possible
benefits for literary studies.

Critique of Methodological Nationalism

Methodological nationalism, which assumes the national category as a
self-evident frame and context for research and the nation as the primary
unit of study, has been a strong tendency in different disciplines of the
social sciences, humanities and cultural studies (see e.g. Wimmer & Glick
Schiller 2002; Amelina et al. 2012). As an approach, it has included an
inclination to see nations as bounded, homogeneous, and static entities, an
inclination which its critics have illustrated by means of a container
metaphor (Beck 2000, 23–6; Wimmer & Glick Schiller 2002). Nation-
states have, in this perspective, come to be seen as naturalized entities,
affixed within territorialized limits (Wimmer & Glick Schiller 2002, 305;
Amelina & Faist 2012). According to its critics, methodologically
nationalist research has shown a proclivity to examine nations as self-
sufficient, autonomous systems changing only from within (Chernilo
2006b, 8; 2006a, 130; 2010, 89 & 2011, 101). It has meant a delimitation
of the study of social phenomena, as society has been equated with the
nation state. Another of its limitations has been its inability to pay
attention to nationalism and nation-building as central to the development
of modern society (Wimmer & Glick Schiller 2002; Amelina & Faist
2012). All in all, the use of the nation as a natural starting point has
directed research in such a way as to disregard other possibly significant
framings and categorizations.

Sociologist Daniel Chernilo has outlined an account of the development of

the critique of methodological nationalism in sociology, dividing it into
three separate waves (Chernilo 2010, 88–91; see also Chernilo 2006a,
6 National, Transnational and Entangled Literatures

130–1 & 2006b, 6–13). According to Chernilo, the theorists of the first
wave did not question the nation-state’s status as the main organizing
principle of the modern world but criticised the lack of attention given to it
as a theoretical concept. The second wave differed decisively from the first
wave, in that it was based on an assumption of profound change in
historical circumstances, its key claim being that the world was going
through an epochal change, globalization, which was undermining the
position and importance of the nation as a frame of thinking. The current
third wave consists of a rethinking of the first two waves: It rejects the
concept of the nation state as a self-evident representation of society and
includes a more careful stance on the hypothesis of the decline of the
nation-state and also on the actual presence of a methodologically
nationalistic approach in previous research. The second and third waves, in
Chernilo’s description, constitute what has been coined as the
transnational turn in various fields of research (Levitt & Nyberg-Sørensen
2004; Jay 2010; Pease 2011).

National literary histories provide illustrative examples of the consequences

of methodologically nationalist approaches. By focusing on the national
representativeness of authors and works of literature, they tend to
emphasise the uniqueness of the literary traditions of the nation in question
and ignore and obliterate the differences within it. Because literary
histories have served as building materials for the master-narrative of the
nation, they have turned a blind eye to, for example, the questions of
shared histories, colonialist tendencies, border cultures and in-between
phenomena. In their readiness to divide the literature of the world into
national sectors, literary histories often fail to recognize and identify the
authors that function in two or more countries or write in two or more
languages.8

Indeed, the notion of a world divided into isolated, self-contained national

entities and literatures is inconsistent with all the detectable cross-border
phenomena affecting the world and the literary field. Seeing the world as
consisting of “national containers” is intuitively incompatible with
phenomena such as transnational migration and travel, as well as the
international communication evident in ever-increasing quantities all
around us. Cross-border mobility, which is spilling and mixing the

8
This was the case with Zenta Maurina, a German-speaking Latvian writer who
lived in Sweden. See Ronne 2011. About this discussion, see also Eysteinsson
2009 and Olsson 2010.
 Pollari, Nissilä, Melkas, Löytty, Kauranen and Grönstrand 7

contents of the containers, or even breaking their rims, is ubiquitous. An

illustrative example of the manifold seepage occurring between national
containers is offered by the most important literary prize in the Finnish
context, the Finlandia Literary Prize. It is not only framed nationalistically
by name; it constitutes a nationally renowned institution, which plays a
major role in both the marketing and the canonization of Finnish novels.
The prize is given out yearly by the Finnish Book Foundation, the aim of
which (according to its rules) is to promote and support domestic literary
art. However, the Finnish nomination of the Slovak-born author Alexandra
Salmela’s novel 27 eli kuolema tekee taiteilijan [27 or Death Makes an
Artist] in 2010 called into question the national framing of the prize. After
the nomination, it was noted that Salmela did not have Finnish citizenship,
which presented a problem, as according to the rules of the prize, it could
only be given to a novel written by a Finnish citizen. However, the
institution showed notable flexibility, as the rules were changed
immediately so that Finnish citizenship was no longer required. Now, the
prize may be awarded to “a meritorious Finnish novel” (“Finnish” here
understood in a national, not linguistic sense). Thus Finnishness came to
be understood as something that is not inextricably connected to the
passport of the author – something of a transnational phenomenon.

The claimed “Finnishness” of the Finlandia Literary Prize is ambiguous in

another sense, too. The Finnish Book Foundation responsible for giving
out the prize was established in 1983 by two institutions, the Finnish
Ministry of Education and the Finnish Book Publishers Association.
However, when one takes a look at the long list of member publishers of
the latter, next to traditional local publishing houses such as The Finnish
Literary Society, Gummerus and WSOY, one finds such names as Egmont
Kustannus (a publishing house owned jointly by Egmont, an international
media group based in Copenhagen, and Sanoma, an international media
group based in Helsinki) and BTJ Finland (a part of the Swedish-based
BTJ group). And even the aforementioned WSOY, with a tradition of
publishing within the Finnish borders reaching back to 1878, is presently a
part of the international Swedish media company Bonnier. Thus, the
supposedly national nature of the prize is given a transnational twist. An
institution that at a superficial glance seems essentially Finnish at a closer
look serves to dismantle an essentialist concept of Finnish literature. This
is telling of the fact that even the seemingly most Finnish of institutions
does not fit within national borders.
8 National, Transnational and Entangled Literatures

The example above is indicative of the fact that the contemporary realities
of cultures, literatures and people do not follow national borders. During
the last few decades, the container metaphor implied by methodological
nationalism and thinking through the category of the nation has been
increasingly questioned. The nation as a framework is inadequate for
understanding current developments in the literary field and in society in
general. There is, and indeed has been, a continuous flow of ideas and
materials between the assumed containers, creating various more or less
permanent connections and interactions. The insufficiency of the national
lens has also become apparent with regard to the historical development of
literatures. As Robert Dixon argues in an Australian context, the field of
literary studies is ready to “explore and elaborate the many ways in which
the national literature has always been connected to the world” (Dixon
2007, 20). In other words, methodological nationalism is an insufficient
approach regarding not only contemporary literary phenomena, but the
history of literature, as well.

The Potential Value of a Nationalist Reading Strategy

Even though the nationalist approach involves evident risks and
shortcomings, it is difficult to write about, discuss or even understand
literary culture without nation as one of the most significant of the social,
cultural and political categories that structures our conceptions of
ourselves and others. The category of nation has implied and continues to
imply the existence of borders and barriers, and through these we have
framed the world in order to conceive, understand and discuss it. As a
category, nation can hardly be stripped from the research agenda, even
when research is deliberately trying to reach out beyond the confines of a
given nation and analyze the cultural flows and connections that exist
independent of national borders. The analysis of the transnational
connections of literature in Finland, for instance, requires balancing texts
and literary phenomena with the national order of the world. However, this
does not merely mean that nation is taken into consideration in the design
of the research, but rather that it is seen as instrumental in the structure of
the research question; a discussion on border-crossings presupposes
borders, and an analysis of transnationalism necessarily reproduces the
idea of nation.

In Finland, literature and nation-building have been inseparably intertwined.

The value of literature, both the genres of epic poem and novel, as a
symbol of modern society was recognised in the mid-nineteenth century.
 Pollari, Nissilä, Melkas, Löytty, Kauranen and Grönstrand 9

Literature formed a significant part of national culture and the difference

between “us” and “them”, establishing Finnish literature as distinct from
other national literatures, was of great importance (e.g. Varpio 1986, 21–
30). Ever since, the category of nation has offered a strong frame for
interpretation in the discipline of literary studies. It has been customary to
see literature as bounded by national borders, which have been seen as
converging with cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and geographic borders. This
frame has produced information about entities generally known as national
literatures. National history has even been a “default narrative” (Jay 2010,
5) in the study of literature. In spite of the fact that Finland is a bilingual
country, with Finnish and Swedish as the official languages, the division
of the literary and cultural field into separate literary institutions and
traditions defined by language has taken place since the end of the
nineteenth century, when Finnish became the language of administration
and education along with Swedish.9

The idea of national literatures lives on in the academic division of

national literature departments (Meltzer 2009). In the Finnish university
system, the study of literature is divided into disciplines of Finnish
literature and Comparative (or literally “General”10) literature.11 In recent
years, pressures have increased to merge the two disciplines, mostly
backed by arguments referring to the economics of higher education and
the intensification of curricular activity and knowledge production. There
are obvious problems in maintaining such a nationalistically motivated
division, but the debates on easing that division have also highlighted the
possible value of a nationalist strategy: a nationalist division can be
motivated by the needs or even demands (of a specific community) for
knowledge concerning locally, geographically, historically, or socially
delimited forms of culture (Meltzer 2009, 56).

Therefore, despite the obvious benefits and wide range of possibilities

offered by the extensive, “general” or comparative points of departure, as
implied, for example, in the ideals of “world literature” (see e.g. Damrosch

9
For a brief overview of Finland’s linguistic situation in the past and present, see
Salo 2012, 26–8.
10
Deriving from the German Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaft.
11
This division of national or domestic and general literature in Finnish higher
education is complicated by the fact that at the University of Helsinki literature
written in Swedish, even if written and published within the Finnish context, is
taught under the heading Scandinavian Literature (in Swedish, “Nordisk litteratur”,
or Nordic Literature).
10 National, Transnational and Entangled Literatures

2003 & 2014; Rosendahl Thomsen 2008), the basis for disciplines such as
“Finnish literature” can be justified simply by referring to a division of
labour in academia: If literary scholars want to do justice to the diversity
of the literary cultures in the world, it is worthwhile to pay attention to
prevailing cultural and linguistic differences between, say, nationally
defined entities. For this, scholars certainly need categories that imply the
existence of national literatures. In order to maintain sensitivity to the
heterogeneity of multicultural and multilingual world literature and to the
particularity of regional cultures – of which national cultures are perhaps
the most dominant – the use of such categories is well-grounded.

Still Life. David Teniers the Younger, c. 1645–1650. Royal Museums of Fine Arts,
Belgium.

Furthermore, a comparative perspective based on “national authors” or

“national literatures” may prove fruitful, depending, of course, on the
research in question. A comparison of objects of analysis, e.g. “Finnish”
and “Swedish” literature, can reveal differences and similarities between
the given entities: In order to perceive the special characteristics of the
chosen objects, it is necessary to compare them with each other. As a
comparison of two entities may also highlight their commonalities, the
comparative method can help uncover the shared history of the objects of
comparison. Basically, however, comparison is not necessarily sensitive to
cultural features common to other similar objects outside the comparison
 Pollari, Nissilä, Melkas, Löytty, Kauranen and Grönstrand 11

(such as stylistic models originating from shared classic texts), thus failing
to acknowledge the original hybrid nature of literary traditions and the
transfer of influences between the compared objects (Sapiro 2011, 231–2).

The argument to be made for the study of national literatures as a

disciplinary endeavour and the benefits of comparisons of national entities
point to the value of national as an epistemological and methodological
framework for research. Furthermore, nationalism as an empirical
phenomenon of the literary field provides yet another incentive for literary
scholars to pay attention to nationalism and the nation state. For example,
nationally delimited state actors continually make their presence felt in the
literary field. The activities may be both regulative and promotional. In
many countries, strikingly so in a Nordic context but also elsewhere,
cultural and arts policies bound by national borders promote national
literary cultures through various measures, for example, by directing
support to local authors, publishers, literary associations and library
requisitions. In the Finnish context, the National Council for Literature, a
part of the Arts Promotion Centre Finland – the names of the bodies
convincingly illustrate the endurance of the national category – is the
central organ for arts policy in the literary field. One of its central policy
measures for supporting individual authors builds on a tradition of viewing
authors as representatives of the nation (“national authors”).

Another apt example of the presence and importance of the national

category is, yet again, the aforementioned Finlandia Literary Prize, which
shows how the interests of a local cultural field and international
commercial actors can coincide within the framework of the national. The
institution that awards the prize, the Finnish Book Foundation, is a joint
venture of two organizations, one governmental (the Finnish Ministry of
Education) and the other commercial (the Finnish Book Publishers
Association). As a result, the Finlandia Literary Prize holds both a
cultural-political and commercial value, both of which are connected to
the perceived positive connotations of the national category. On one hand,
the Finlandia Prize serves the interests of national cultural politics by
promoting and strengthening a cultural entity named “Finnish literature”.
On the other, it markedly boosts the sales of certain novels – the
candidates and especially the winner – every year.

As the nominees for the Finlandia Literary Prize are announced at the
beginning of November and the winner in December, references to the
Finnish nation and Finnishness are useful not only in promoting valued
12 National, Transnational and Entangled Literatures

literature for readers but also in increasing Christmas sales. Thus, the
significance of the “nation/national” for the literary field and in the minds
of the reading public can be grasped by asking this: Would the favourable
business impact of the prize be the same without the connection to the
nation or under a different name and without the connotation of “our”
literature that it implies? This question highlights the importance of and
need for the “nation” and the “national” as analytical concepts in the study
of literature.

From the perspective of the so-called “national minorities”, the national is

a significant yet often complex and ambivalent category. When a group in
a minority position tries to receive recognition and gain its own “voice” in
the established literary field, the national category is inevitably intertwined
with questions of identity and identity politics. An example of the use of
the national category are the efforts to define a Sámi literature in which
nationalism can serve as an empowerment strategy in the struggle for the
rights of an oppressed and colonised group of people.12

For example, the author Nils-Aslak Valkeapää (1943–2001) participated in

the construction of Sámi history and cultural identity, and at the same time
created new ways of expression that gained him a global audience. He was
born in Finland, and his debut work, the pamphlet Terveisiä Lapista
[1971; Greetings from Lapland] was in Finnish, but he is best known for
his Sámi language poems. He was awarded the Nordic Council Literature
Prize in 1991 for his collection of poems Beaivi, áhčážan [1988; The Sun,
My Father]. His earlier work, Ruoktu váimmus [1985; Trekways of the
Wind], had already been proposed as the Sámi candidate for the prize, and
the nomination helped to increase interest in Sámi literature in the Nordic
countries. This interest only grew when Valkeapää finally won the
prestigious prize in 1991. 13 His status as a representative of Finnish
literature is furthermore complicated by the fact that since 1996 he lived in
Skibotn, Norway. Valkeapää’s career and oeuvre demonstrate the different
layers in the transnational texture of literature: local (Sámi), national
(Finnish, Norwegian), regional (Nordic) and global – as well as their
interconnectedness. On the other hand, his success provides an example of
another kind of tendency that an author representing both local and global
cultures may face. While Valkeapää has been praised as a representative

12
About this discussion see Hirvonen 1999/2008.
13
See Harald Gaski:
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/sami/diehtu/siida/reindeer/valk.htm
 Pollari, Nissilä, Melkas, Löytty, Kauranen and Grönstrand 13

for Sámi culture, the celebratory pursuits include the risk of making an
indigenous artist appear as a token in a national context, serving the
purpose of showing that there is no discrimination and that national or
regional literatures are inclusive.

The examples above illustrate the importance and various uses of the
category of the nation in the literary field. Despite the transnational turn
within the study of literature, the national still occupies a central role in the
way literature is produced and consumed, as well as conceptualized and
presented. Therefore, it cannot be left out of the research agenda of literary
studies. This does not, however, mean advocating a hasty u-turn back
toward methodological nationalism; instead, we should focus critical
attention on how the national category is applied and understood in the
literary field. But the relevance of nationalism and the nation state to the
literary field is not the only reason for literary scholars to pay attention to
the category of the nation. A case can also be made for the use of the
nation as an epistemological and methodological tool and framework, a
form of “enlightened methodological nationalism” (Pries and Seeliger
2012, 234). Framing research in disciplinary terms as focused on
nationally delimited literatures is at least in a strategic sense defensible,
despite the fact that literary cultures in many ways, or even predominantly,
are formed transnationally. Also, comparative research may gain from
taking the national category as a starting point. Thus, the conscious use of
methodological nationalism appears as a possibly useful, rather than a
straightforwardly dismissible, distorted reading strategy. In fact, this
strategy may be used as one undercurrent in literary studies aiming at an
understanding of the transnational connections within the literary world.

Towards Transnational Literary Studies

Although the transnational turn and, before that, the globalization debates
have come to accentuate the relations between entities defined as national,
cross-border cultural diffusion and global flows did not go unnoticed in
earlier scholarly debates. For example, within literary studies, in the
tradition following the ideas of J. W. Goethe, all literatures of the world
have been considered as part of Weltliteratur, a concept describing the
international circulation and reception of literary works, predominantly in
Europe but also including texts of non-Western origin (e.g. Damrosch
2014, Rosendahl Thomsen 2008, 2–20; Damrosch 2003).
14 National, Transnational and Entangled Literatures

In the social sciences, previous analysis framed cultural exchange through

the concepts of cultural imperialism, homogenization and hegemony
(Tomlinson 1999, 79). The spread of cultural products was seen as largely
unidirectional, based on and reproducing international power relations
shaping the world in, for example, geopolitical centres and peripheries, or
first, second and third worlds. In national contexts, “foreign” elements
were seen as a threat to local cultures and literatures. What later on would
be dubbed as transnationalism was rather understood in the framework of
international relations, where the national category was still the norm,
although the cultural exchange under critique was not necessarily driven
by nation states or state actors but by various kinds of actors, such as
media and publishing houses.

Transnationalism as a concept has come to highlight cross-border social

and cultural relations that are upheld by other kinds of actors than those
based on the nation state. Steven Vertovec’s well-established definition of
transnationalism states the following:

When referring to sustained linkages and ongoing exchanges among non-

state actors based across national borders – businesses, non-government
organizations, and individuals sharing the same interests (by way of
criteria such as religious beliefs, common cultural and geographic origins)
– we can differentiate these as ‘transnational’ practices and groups
(referring to their links functioning across nation-states). The collective
attributes of such connections, their processes of formation and
maintenance, and their wider implications are referred to broadly as
‘transnationalism’. (Vertovec 2009, 3; see also Hannerz 1996, 6)

This definition serves to separate transnational relations from international

relations, drawing a line between different kinds of actors and their
respective forms of action. This separation is in many ways useful and
informative of the dynamics of the literary field, but it needs to be
complemented by the assertion that the study of the transnational by no
means rules out attention being paid to the meanings of nationalism and
the role of the nation state. As Ulrich Beck proposes in his definition of a
cosmopolitan perspective for research, the national and the transnational
are not in opposition to each other. Instead, the national needs to be
understood as something continually formed by transnational processes.
(Beck 2004, 147; 2006, 6–7.)

Whereas Vertovec’s definition above accentuates the role of different

actors, Arjun Appadurai’s analysis of a globalized world through various
 Pollari, Nissilä, Melkas, Löytty, Kauranen and Grönstrand 15

“scapes” and “flows” has offered a much-referred-to point of view that

highlights diverse aspects of the transnationalism of the literary field. His
analysis delineates five dimensions in the global flows that form people’s
“imagined worlds”: ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes
and ideoscapes. Rehearsing these reminds us of the various means through
which transnational connections, and, indeed, as Appadurai highlights,
“disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy”, have been
generated. Appadurai’s description points to a broad spectrum of both
material and ideational flows, and makes literary studies’ predominant
focus on the transnational as a literary theme appear limited (Appadurai
1996, 27–47).

The questions of migration (transnational and internal), cultural exchange,

social mobility and rootlessness are certainly not novelties in literature, but
one can safely claim that transnational issues – the name of the
phenomenon may vary – have become a dominant cultural theme in
contemporary literature (Ponzanesi & Merolla 2005; Frank 2010). And as
transnational issues have come to the fore, literary scholars have paid
substantial attention to novels that discuss global changes and their local
consequences in one way or another. The oeuvre of the Finnish novelist-
playwright Sofi Oksanen presents an example of literature that is
thematically tied to a transnational world and migrant experiences, an
aspect of her work that has been variably noted in its reception (Tuomarla
2013). Oksanen’s treatment of Estonian history and, more broadly, the
blind spots of Western historiography, have been praised by readers as
well as critics. The theme is present even in Oksanen’s debut novel
Stalinin lehmät [2003; Stalin’s Cows], which can be read as a migration
story or migration literature (e.g. Grönstrand 2010).

Neil Lazarus’s critical comment on postcolonial criticism also applies to

research on transnational literature: “To read across postcolonial literary
studies is to find, to an extraordinary degree, the same questions asked, the
same methods, techniques, and conventions used, the same concepts
mobilized, the same conclusions drawn – about the work of a remarkably
small number of writers [...].” Lazarus actually states, “for the purpose of
illustration”, that there is only one author in the postcolonial literary canon,
Salman Rushdie, whose novels are “endlessly and fatuously cited in the
critical literature as testifying to the imagined-ness – that is to say, ideality
– of nationhood, the ungeneralisable subjectivism of memory and
experience, the instability of social identity, the volatility of truth, the
narrational constructedness of history, and so on” (Lazarus 2005, 424).
16 National, Transnational and Entangled Literatures

The eagerness of literary scholars to focus on either very few authors or on

the thematic dimensions of literary works disregards a majority of the
various cross-border flows in a transnational, global society. Consequently,
the whole question of transnationalism and literature is excluded to its own
hermetic sphere.14

Although the attention to thematic trends in literature highlights social

changes, it does not destabilize the understanding of literatures as national.
What it does do is essentially to show that the thematic scope of national
literature has broadened to cover new topics reflecting and constructing
contemporary (transnational) society. Literary studies obviously need to
account for such shifts on the level of literary works, but the transnational
perspective on literature delineates many other ways in which a local
literature is not only national but is constructed in relation to other
literatures.

In addition to focusing on depictions and thematisations of a world formed

by globalization and transnational connections, a methodologically
transnationalist study might concentrate on the ways that texts themselves
move across both geographic and linguistic borders. Texts travel both as
physical forms, including tangible objects, such as books as well as digital
texts, and as textual phenomena, such as influences, adaptations,
intertextualities and translations. As part of the transnational mediascapes,
translations, for example, display how books, ideas, and ideologies move
from one place to another and suggest new kinds of reception and
interpretations. Traditionally, literary scholars have had difficulties
accommodating translations in literary histories and their areas of study
(see e.g. Kovala et al. 2007 and Eysteinsson 2009). Translations have not
always been valued for their aesthetic qualities, and there is a long
tradition of seeing translations as inauthentic and misleading copies of the
original. Another reason for the absence of translations in literary histories
is the nation-orientedness of the genre, its function seen as presenting the
characteristic features of “national” literature and literary culture, which is

14
Søren Frank’s definition of “migration literature”, drawing on Georg Lukács’s
literary theory, broadens the scope from a thematic viewpoint to an understanding
of literature’s material characteristics as equally important aspects of literature of
the age of increased migration, globalization and transnational contacts. As Frank
(2010, 48) proposes, “through its form, the migrant novel sets out to express the
content of our experiences of interculturalism and globalization [...] and, at the
same time, resolve the problems posed by these same experiences [...]”.
 Pollari, Nissilä, Melkas, Löytty, Kauranen and Grönstrand 17

done by guarding the borders and keeping them clean of “foreign”

influences (see e.g. Eysteinsson 2009, 57).

For a number of years, however, there have been signs indicating a change
in attitudes. Astradur Eysteinsson (2009) suggests that instead of regarding
translation as a threat that ruptures the context and continuity of national
literary history, it provides means to explore the context of these literary
histories, showing them to be constructions rather than natural entities.
The “foreign” is present within the literary system in many different ways,
not only as foreign authors or literary works. Despite his positive attitude
towards translation, Eysteinsson sees that we are still far from a literary
history based on dialogues between the local and the foreign. For him, a
separate volume of a history of literary translations, such as the history of
Finnish translations of fiction (Riikonen et al. 2007a & 2007b), is only one
necessary step in the process towards a more versatile history of literary
culture, in which the focus is on hybridity and cross-cultural dialogue
(Eysteinsson 2009).

The case of Sofi Oksanen’s novel Puhdistus (2008; Purge 2010) is

exemplary of a text that crosses geographical and linguistic borders, and
thus a fitting subject for a methodologically transnationalistic study.
Translated into more than 30 languages with a largely positive reception,
Purge has been an international success. It has not only been read as a
historical novel dealing with Estonian history but also as a thriller, a crime
novel, a melodrama, and women’s fiction, and it has been compared to
works by, for example, Bertolt Brecht, Christa Wolf and Hertha Müller
(Lappalainen 2013). On the one hand, the themes and genres that it
discusses are not bound to any specific national or cultural context, but on
the other hand, as literary scholars have pointed out, the reception of the
novel varies depending on the historical and cultural contexts of the
country in question (Laanes 2012; Lappalainen 2013). In Estonia,
Oksanen’s way of representing the country’s history has come under
critical debate. Oksanen has been accused of using elements of popular
culture and thus sensationalizing and commercializing the sufferings of the
Estonian people. Moreover, the critical views about Purge have also had
to do with the memory politics concerning the Soviet era: The depiction of
the totalitarianism of the Stalin period clashed with some readers’ positive
memories of the later Soviet period and its everyday life. Many reviewers
were also dissatisfied with how Oksanen portrayed Estonians (see
Lappalainen 2013 and Laanes 2010 and 2012) So, although most of the
international reviewers of Purge did not highlight Oksanen’s nationality,
18 National, Transnational and Entangled Literatures

in Estonia it was discussed, and her right, as a foreigner, to write about

Estonian history was questioned.

The manifold reception of Purge demonstrates that even when literature

seems to move relatively easily from one cultural context to another,
questions concerning nationality may still appear highly relevant. This
serves as a reminder of Ulrich Beck’s (2004 and 2006) notion that the
transnational and the national should not be conceived as binary opposites
but rather as co-existing and mutually beneficial conceptual lenses. A
thorough grasp of the various aspects of the cross-border reception of
Purge requires the use not of either a national or a transnational lens, but
of a national as well as a transnational one. Thus, a methodologically
transnationalist approach might reach beyond the very binary opposition
of separation and interaction as well as of their conception as mutually
exclusive categories. Instead, from this point of view, they form a
continuum.

A methodologically transnationalistic study may also concentrate on how

literary objects – for instance, books – cross borders and how they are
affected by the process. The circulation of books has always been closely
linked with economy and markets, but in the globalized world the book’s
role as a commodity has become even more important than before. In step
with the decreasing barriers of trade, the commercialization of literature
has increased. It is expected that the author will actively participate in the
marketing of his/her works, and information about copies of novels sold as
well as the interest shown in authors and their works abroad, in the form of
translation rights, positive reviews, and prizes, has become an integral part
of the value attached to literature (Kantokorpi 2013, 201–205; Arminen
2013, 165–176). These processes also have an impact on the contents and
interpretations of literature. Hanna Kuusela’s study of the controversies
surrounding Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad’s novel Bokhandleren i
Kabul (2002; The Bookseller of Kabul 2003) is illustrative of a literary
study focusing on the circulation of books as global capitalist commodities,
which are diffused cross-culturally and produce various local responses
(Kuusela 2011; 2013a; 2013b).

Kuusela focuses on the material aspects of literature and the book as a

commodity with effects on social reality. Rather than engaging in an
interpretation of the contents of the book she uses as a case study, Kuusela
 Pollari, Nissilä, Melkas, Löytty, Kauranen and Grönstrand 19

follows the book through a transnational network 15 formed by its

translations and local publications. In this series of transfers, the book’s
form and paratexts – covers, prefaces, back cover descriptions, and
advertisements – change, which has consequences for the interpretive
framework and reception of the book. In its various guises, the book forms
alliances or articulations with other kinds of actors and consequently has
effects for how, for example, Afghan women’s lives and stories are
interpreted and formed cross-culturally and transnationally. Kuusela’s
study also illustrates how goods such as books as transnational actors can
be much more effective than people, as the constraints that people face in
the globalized world may be much more intense than those faced by
commodities. While their story could enter the Norwegian public sphere
without problems, it was much harder for Shah Muhammad Rais, the
model for the bookseller of Kabul, and his family to leave Afghanistan or
enter Norway (Kuusela 2011).

The Bookseller of Kabul provides one example of how literary objects

generate power effects. It also exemplifies Appadurai’s proposition about
global media flows, enabled by technological and financial processes. The
case also makes visible the significance of authors on the move in
transnational space. The changing ethnoscape appears in parallel with the
flows of literary texts, ideas and interpretations. To understand these
variegated flows, a radically different frame of interpretation is required
for literary research. The life and career of Iraqi short story writer and
filmmaker Hassan Blasim exemplifies the incongruent relationship
between literatures and nation states. Blasim, whom a critic in the
Guardian referred to as “perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive”
(Yassin-Kassab 2010), has lived in Tampere, Finland, since 2004. His
collection of short stories, The Madman of Freedom Square (2009), has
been translated into, for example, English, Italian, Spanish, Polish and
Finnish; a heavily edited version of the book was finally published in
Arabic in 2012, only to be immediately banned in Jordan. When
discussing Blasim’s location in a transnational atlas, it is necessary to
consider that Blasim’s first channel for publishing has been the internet,16
a forum that has had a significant transnational effect on literary culture all
over the world and is an especially convenient publishing platform for
literature in transnational languages such as Arabic, with possible readers

15
Kuusela speaks of actor-networks, as her materialist study is heavily influenced
by actor-network theory.
16
Iraq Story, www.iraqstory.com.
20 National, Transnational and Entangled Literatures

scattered all around the world. The example of Blasim illustrates how the
literary field is affected by the movement of people, among them authors,
and the dissemination of texts through various media. To use Appadurai’s
(1996) terminology, a manifold of scapes form the transnational literary
field, all of which are of significance for the research agenda of the study
of literature.

Literary Entanglements
Although “methodological transnationalism” opens up new avenues for
the understanding of the literary field and the national category, the term
transnational already on the level of phrasing preserves the national
category. A focus on transnationalism is tied by the precise borders – and
the entities separated by these borders – that are questioned or pointed out
to be the place of crossings or leakages.

As a spatial metaphor, the transnational refers and gives preference to one

aspect of the mapping of the world, one based on nations. In a study
concerning migrants’ networks, Ruben Gielis (2009) claims that fixating
on the transnational obstructs research from perceiving other possibly
significant social networks, such as those based on family, kin or work
relations. Gielis suggests that a focus on networks, such as transnational
ones, should be complemented by an attention to place. The “place lens” –
taking the places where the various networks forming a migrant’s life
intersect as the starting point of research – would allow the researcher to
see how multiple social networks interact in a specific case. Gielis even
suggests that it would be better to use the term trans-social rather than
transnational to describe migration, since migrants move along many other
networks in addition to the transnational. From this point of view,
“methodological network-ism” (Gielis 2009, 283), a focus on one specific
network, and consequently “methodological transnationalism”, presents
itself as a problem.

In Gielis’s view, place not only allows us to see the interaction of multiple
networks in one setting but also helps the researcher grasp the translocality
of social life. Drawing on Appadurai, Gielis defines the migrant place as
translocal, meaning that it is a site from which “transmigrants reach out to
people in other places” (Gielis 2009, 278), for example, through
communication technologies or even imagination. According to Gielis,
“[s]tudying migrant places in their capacity as translocalities means that,
conceptually, we can no longer regard places as separate from each other”
 Pollari, Nissilä, Melkas, Löytty, Kauranen and Grönstrand 21

(Gielis 2009, 282), that is, place becomes a continuum and locality, a form
of in-between-ness.

Despite this effort to rewrite the concept of place as something other than
a space clearly separate from other spaces, the concept of translocality
obviously carries the same connotations as the transnational. Instead of a
network built along the category of nations, we end up with a network of
locales, and as Angelika Epple notes with reference to redefinitions of
space, “the local reintroduces the notion of a fixed container. The local
becomes the last refuge of traditionally defined space” (Epple 2012, 169).
The prefix “trans-” creates a border between the containers defined by the
prefix, simultaneously producing these containers. The change of the level
or scale – from the local, national, regional, to continental and back – does
not alter this.

A third alternative to be placed alongside the national and transnational

analytic gazes is the perspective offered by the concept of “entanglement”,
perhaps best known from historians’ development of alternatives to
methodological nationalism under the umbrella term “entangled history”.17
In comparison with the other two viewpoints highlighting the national
category and transnational connections, entanglement has special
characteristics, which makes it useful for the study of literature.

The concept of entanglement is not altogether new to literary studies. It is,

for example, present in Suman Gupta’s Globalization and Literature
(2009). Borrowing the concept from Susie O’Brien and Imre Szeman’s
introduction to the “The globalization of fiction/The fiction of
globalization” special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, Gupta states his
wish to move his study “away from considerations of ‘how globalization is
reflected thematically in fiction’ and towards understanding a
‘fundamental entanglement’ between literature and globalization” (Gupta
2009, 62; O’Brien & Szeman 2001). A quote from the final paragraph of
Gupta’s study illustrates what literature’s entanglement with globalization
implies: “(U)ltimately the relationship between globalization and literature
is arguably most immediately to be discerned not in terms of what is
available inside literature and within literary studies, but in terms of the
manner in which globalized markets and industries act upon and from
outside literature and literary studies” (Gupta 2009, 170).

17
According to Angelika Epple (2012, 163), the term originates from Sebastian
Conrad and Shalini Randeria (2002).
22 National, Transnational and Entangled Literatures

Another instance of the use of the concept “entangled” in literary studies

comes from Gisèle Sapiro, a scholar of the sociology of literature, who
stresses the necessity of comparison as a research method (Sapiro 2011,
228) but also highlights the methodological nationalism intrinsic to it as its
central limitation (Sapiro 2011, 231). Sapiro suggests the study of cultural
transfers and literary exchanges as a way of “denationalizing” the method.
According to her, such a study should concentrate on the flows of
translations through which literary works circulate and on the reception of
the translated texts. However, such a study requires, as Sapiro remarks,
that “we scrupulously reconstitute the relevant spaces” (ibid., 233–4). By
this she apparently means taking into account the specific socio-historical
configurations where the transfers take place. Sapiro dubs this approach
“an entangled historical sociology of literature” (ibid., 226, 235).

An approach based on entanglements breaks down a strictly national

perspective in a similar way as that of the concept “transnational” does: It
abandons the notion of isolated, self-sufficient national containers and
directs attention to the connections and interactions between them.
However, while “transnational” carries with it the term “national”, which
implies a connection to the concepts of the nation or the nation-state and
their significance, “entangled” lacks this connection and directly allows
the examination of any given entities (Epple 2012, 163).

In literary studies, one may take as a starting point any of the various
forms of literary culture (a text, a literary work, a literary institution or
some dimension of it) and study it as a national phenomenon or a
phenomenon produced through uses of the national category. One may
also approach it as transnational, as a result of border-crossing flows and
connections of various sorts. However, both of these approaches tie
literary culture to the nation. This approach, connecting literature to the
national, may be and often is highly relevant, but caution should always be
taken not to let it overshadow other relevant categories or networks that
may have explanatory power when attempting to understand literary
culture. The national and transnational networks that literary phenomena
invoke do not act without the infusion of effects of other networks
functioning along other categories and concepts demarcating both thinking
and being in the world.

As the debates on super-diversity (e.g. Vertovec 2007) or intersectionality

remind us, identities and forms of belonging – inclusion as well as
exclusion – are formed in a mix of variables of intertwining axes, in which
 Pollari, Nissilä, Melkas, Löytty, Kauranen and Grönstrand 23

nation(ality) and transnationality interact with the dimensions of gender,

class, race or ethnicity and sexuality, to name only those most commonly
summarised as effective in an intersectional ensemble. But there are also
other aspects of people’s lives that form their biographies – family and
kinship relationships, working life experiences, and educational careers,
among others. An author’s work and presence in the literary field can be
placed along manifold different combinations of axes. And specifically in
the literary field, nationally and transnationally formed authors, texts and
institutions develop in other relations central to the literary field. There are,
for example, the literary or textual traditions and conventions of writing, in
operation both in the writing of fiction and in criticism in media and
academia. These traditions have been formed within histories of both
national, transnational and other relations and trajectories.

As the reception of Sofi Oksanen’s Purge, discussed in the previous

section, indicates, her authorship and body of work offer a revealing
example of various entanglements that stretch beyond the national or
transnational networks. Whereas the transnational Finnish-Estonian
connection is productive when trying to describe Oksanen’s production
and its reception, a fuller picture is received when the effects of the
(trans)national networks are related to other networks. For example,
gender (as network) plays a crucial role in the authorship of Oksanen. Not
only can Oksanen be ascribed to two nationally defined literary traditions
but to a tradition of “women writers” as well. On the one hand, Oksanen
can be aligned with a tradition following Finnish-Estonian women authors
Aino Kallas (1878–1956) and Hella Wuolijoki (1886–1954), two
controversial figures who in their large oeuvres dealt with history, placing
women in its centre. On the other hand, Oksanen’s case also shows how
the transnational networks interact and are entangled with gender networks
and networks of literary conventions, where nationality and national
borders are of little importance. From this perspective, she appears not
only as a transnational actor but also as a part of a continuum of long-
standing historical entanglements involving several intertwined networks.

Moreover, Oksanen’s creative navigation in the capitalist economy of

book publishing illustrates how transnationalism and economic networks
are interrelated. Purge has been a remarkable success. It was a bestseller in
Finland and Estonia, and it has sold very well also, for example, in France
and the United States (see Lappalainen 2013). Her latest novel, Kun
kyyhkyset katosivat [2012; When the Doves Disappeared], has so far not
been a similar economic success, but the media circus, which also
24 National, Transnational and Entangled Literatures

previously surrounded the author and her works, has been more extensive
than before. Economic interests, skilled marketing strategies, media
relations and transnational networks were intricately intertwined as the
release of the Finnish-language book was organised in Estonia,
accompanied by huge media interest. The occasion also combined the
release of the new book with the launch of the film version of Purge. In
this transnational event, the multi-dimensional entangledness of the
literary field and its actors is highlighted. It carries evidence of
entanglements with linguistic networks, various media networks (activated
both in the coverage of the event and in the inter- or multi-medial
character of the release party) and, as a consequence, with multiple
economic networks.

All in all, whereas the application of the transnational and even the
national lens has clear benefits for answering questions of literary research
(as we have aimed to show in this article), both perspectives centre, albeit
in very different ways, on the category of the nation. It is precisely in this
context that the concept of entanglement becomes useful. It liberates us
from the national category on the level of explicit discourse, whilst not
precluding attention to it. Thus entanglement as a term enables an
acknowledgement of both the lessening significance and the persistence of
the national category and the nation state in a globalized world. In addition,
entanglement as a concept proposes that the national category and
transnational networks can be studied in relation to other categories and
networks forming the literary field and its various components, from texts
to authors and institutions.

The “entanglement approach” to literature not only deconstructs the

relation between literature – or any cultural texts, for that matter – and the
national order of the world, but also reaches beyond the binarism of
nationalism and transnationalism. Literatures do not have to be
conceptualized as either national or transnational but, depending on the
interest of the study, may be considered as both – or neither. Shifting the
nation from the status of a compulsory structural component of research to
that of one category among others creates an open terrain in which to
recognize, choose and make use of any relevant categories – including
nation – or relevant entanglements between those categories.

Mikko Pollari (University of Tampere), Hanna-Leena Nissilä (University

of Oulu), Kukku Melkas, Olli Löytty, Ralf Kauranen and Heidi
Grönstrand (University of Turku) are members of the research project
 Pollari, Nissilä, Melkas, Löytty, Kauranen and Grönstrand 25

“The Transnational Connections of Finnish Literary Culture” (2012–2013,

funded by the Kone Foundation).

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 CHALLENGING THE BODIES AND BORDERS
OF LITERATURE IN SCANDINAVIA:
METHODOLOGICAL NATIONALISM,
INTERSECTIONALITY AND METHODOLOGICAL
DISCIPLINARITY

ANNIKA OLSSON

Abstract: This article reflects on the problem of methodological nationalism

as well as the concept of intersectionality in relation to national literary
histories in Scandinavia. I analyse 1) how nations and national borders are
used and understood in the formation of what is labelled Danish,
Norwegian and Swedish literature and 2) how these “bodies” of literature,
made visible and understandable by geographically defined borders, also
are related to which human bodies are included or excluded in these
Scandinavian literatures. The relationship between these different kinds of
bodies and borders is important to analyse since they are related to
challenging scientific and democratic problems. Concepts like
methodological nationalism and intersectionality can help us identify
which bodies and borders are important to discuss and problematise but
can also be instrumental in an attempt to challenge the bodies and borders
of literature. Addressing these problems can give us analytical advantages
that help us produce a new understanding of who and what is included in
or thought of as belonging to different nations, but looking at these ideas
also help us understand how research and education are organised.
Additionally, in order to achieve these objectives we need to acknowledge
a problem that I will call methodological disciplinarity.

Keywords: Literary history, Scandinavia, methodological nationalism,

intersectionality, methodological disciplinarity
 Annika Olsson 31

“Had I too also once thought too readily about THE German and THE
Frenchman, rather than keeping in view the diversity of the Germans and
the French?”
—Victor Klemperer1

During recent decades a wide range of different theoretical perspectives

and theories have contributed to a lively and important critical discussion
on a number of key concepts in the literary field, concepts such as
literature, text, authorship, canon, and genre. Even though the discursive
constructions of national literary canons have been challenged, the role
and function of the nation in and for comparative literature have not been
challenged in the same way. The issue of methodological nationalism has
not been problematised enough, at least not in Scandinavia.

This article reflects on the problem of methodological nationalism and the

concept of intersectionality in relation to national literary histories in
Scandinavia. I am interested in analysing 1) how nations and national
borders are used and understood in the formation of what is labelled
Danish, Norwegian and Swedish literature and 2) how these “bodies” of
literature, made visible and understandable by geographically defined
borders, are also related to the question of which human bodies are
included or excluded in Scandinavian literatures. These are problems that I
have touched on earlier but are further discussed and developed here
(Olsson 2013; Olsson 2010a; Olsson 2010b). My interest in these
questions partly comes from my background as a critical reader of literary
histories, but it is also related to my experience of being involved in the
production of literary histories as an author and an editor and having to
tackle the dilemmas of what and whom to include or exclude on a more
practical level.2

The relationship between these different kinds of bodies and borders is

important to analyse since they are related to challenging scientific and
democratic problems. Concepts like methodological nationalism and
intersectionality can help us identify what bodies and borders are important

1
Klemperer 1996, 359, my transl. Orig.: “Vielleicht hatte vordem auch ich zu oft
DER Deutsche gedacht und DER Franzose, statt an die Manningfaltigkeit der
Deutschen und Franzosen zu denken?”
2
I was part of the group that re-edited and rewrote the edition of Litteraturens
historia i Sverige that was published by Norstedts förlag in 2009, and I am also
involved, as an author, in the production of a new Nordic literary history, due to be
published by Studentlitteratur in 2015.
32 Challenging the Bodies and Borders of Literature in Scandinavia

to discuss and problematise, but the concepts can also be instrumental in

challenging the bodies and borders of literature. Addressing these
problems may give us analytical advantages that help us produce a new
understanding of who and what is included in or thought of as belonging
to different nations, but looking at these ideas also can help us understand
how research and education are organized. Additionally, in order to
achieve these objectives we need to acknowledge a problem that I will call
methodological disciplinarity.

The empirical material in the article consists of literary histories of

different kinds produced for the national book markets in the three
countries that make up the foundation of what is understood as
Scandinavia: Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The selection is also related
to the fact that these literary histories are written in languages that are
understandable to me: Danish, Norwegian and my native language
Swedish. This article uses what Bowker and Leigh Star describe as a
pragmatist perspective to understand and classify literary histories:
Anything that is called and treated as, in this case, a literary history can be
included under the term (Bowker and Leigh Star 2000, 13). Therefore, I
simply chose to search for Danish, Norwegian and Swedish literary
histories in the Swedish library catalogue Libris (the joint catalogue of the
Swedish academic and research libraries) since this is an important method
ordinary readers use to find literary histories. The article focuses on
histories that cover a longer historical period and that were published
during the period between 1980 and 2010, partly due to practical reasons
but mainly because this is a period where comparative literature as a
discipline but also literary history writing as a genre have been heavily
criticised and discussed (see, for example, Williams 1997; Nordlund
2005). Taking into consideration that many literary histories are extensive
projects published in many volumes, I also chose to put emphasis on
sections in the literary histories such as introductions, prefaces or
postscripts, where the authors or editors have the possibility to situate and
explain what kind of literary history they have produced. These segments
give an opportunity to frame the narratives and also function as a threshold
for the interpretation of the specific literary history (Genette 1997).

The article is divided into three sections: The first is theoretical and
methodological and includes a discussion of the concepts of methodological
nationalism, intersectionality and why it is helpful to combine the two.
The second section is analytical and consists of a critical reading of the
 Annika Olsson 33

different literary histories. The third is a discussion, which introduces the

concept of methodological disciplinarity.

Nationalism and Intersectionality:

Making Visible Bodies and Borders
The words of the German philologist Victor Klemperer (1881–1960),
quoted in the beginning of this article, problematise his life-long obsession
with the question of what could be considered German or French instead
of focusing on differences among the German and the French. The quote is
a vivid reminder of how stuck we are in thinking in terms of national
categories, but it also suggests that this taken-for-granted thinking is
related to and embedded in different professional practices. This
categorisation is not something that is imposed on us as individuals as we
go along in life; it is a practice that we learn when we are trained or
disciplined, as Foucault would call it, to become professional scholars –
even if we are not completely aware that we learn it (Foucault 2002). From
this perspective Klemperer’s reflection also reminds us how important it is
to hang onto another part of what it means to be a professional scholar,
namely the critical perspective, and to try to question preconceived
notions, remembering that science is a social practice (Kuhn 1996;
Minnich 2005).

The concept of methodological nationalism is an attempt at making visible

the problem that Klemperer refers to, more specifically that the nation-
state is taken for granted as a social and a political unit in science, and one
of the functions of methodological nationalism is to analyse and discuss
how this affects (social) science. Wimmer and Glick Schiller state that this
is partly due to the fact that social science and the nation-state were born
and grew up together, and they discuss three different modes of
methodological nationalism: 1) that the nation or the national is ignored or
omitted in science; 2) that the nation or the national is naturalised and
taken for granted in science; and 3) that problems studied by social
sciences have been territorialised and directly related to nations and
national borders (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002; Amelina et al. 2012).

If methodological nationalism is focused on the problem of the nation in

relation to science, how does it relate to intersectionality? Intersectionality
has come a long way since it first entered the research field in the 1980s.
Starting out as a critical analytical concept, it has been used, developed,
discussed and described in many different ways: as a concept, a theory, a
34 Challenging the Bodies and Borders of Literature in Scandinavia

perspective, a method, a methodology, and today it could be considered a

specific research field (McCall 2005; de los Reyes & Mulinari 2005;
Davies 2008; Franken et al. 2009; Lykke 2010). The different kinds of
problems that intersectionality helps us analyse and understand have been
discussed for a long time, both within and outside academia (Brah &
Phoenix 2004), but the concept was introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw in
an article from 1989. She argued that 1) the experience of black women
was not included in the discourses that analysed and discussed
discrimination and 2) that this exclusion was directly related to the fact
that discrimination was considered to be either about sex/gender or race,
and not sex/gender and race at the same time. Therefore, both the scientific
and political community required a concept like intersectionality in order
to analyse and understand both what discrimination is/was really about and
what discrimination does to people (Crenshaw 1989). As Crenshaw made
very clear, sexism and racism are interrelated, not separate phenomena,
and therefore also must be handled as such by researchers, politicians and
activists (see also Crenshaw 1991; 1992; Young 1997; Hill Collins 1998).

Intersectionality has different meanings depending on the background and

perspective of the scholar who defines it, but generally the concept focuses
on how social inequalities are created in relation to a number of “power
differentials and/or constraining normativities” that interact and intersect
but also change and differ depending on the situation, time and
place/location (Lykke 2011, 50). This means that, as Crenshaw argued,
discrimination (or privilege) can hardly ever be said to be about either
gender or race (or social class, religion, sexuality, ability, age or any other
category); instead it is always about gender and something else, or race
and something else, since an intersectional perspective underscores that
there are no “pure” categories and, therefore, no “pure” causes for
discrimination. This is also the reason why some researchers choose to talk
about intra-action instead of interaction (McCall 2005), since intersectionality
is about constantly ongoing processes “of mutual construction and
transformation” and not about separate, stable categories, coming from
different places, meeting and interacting and then moving on as if nothing
happened (Lykke 2011, 51). in addition, all of this means that it is, in
principle, impossible to decide in advance what power relations are most
important to analyse, and that the analysis also needs to focus on how
power, discrimination, social status, identity, or any other phenomenon is
produced – which calls attention to the different processes and actors that
are involved in the production of knowledge in itself.
 Annika Olsson 35

Both methodological nationalism and intersectionality build on critical and

reflexive approaches to knowledge production, even if they originate from
different scientific fields and focus on different scientific problems. My
understanding of the two concepts is grounded in the long, on-going
discussion on “the science question” and situated knowledges that are
fundamental in different kinds of critical theory, especially in feminist and
postcolonial theories, which are my areas of study (Mohanty 1984;
Haraway 1988; Spivak 1999; Minnich 2005; Harding 2006). Thus, I
recognize and use methodological nationalism and intersectionality as
critical and analytical tools that help make visible what is naturalized,
problematise what is taken for granted and change by imagining what is
absent (Spivak 2008, 4). Combining the two perspectives helps me focus
on both the bodies and the borders of literature at the same time. They call
for bringing questions related to nations, human bodies and the lives and
experiences of human beings into a discussion that focuses on power,
knowledge and democracy.

Raewyn Connell makes a very strong argument for why it is important to

work in this way in Southern Theory (2007). She analyses social science
from a perspective that emphasises that situated knowledge is about
conceptualising knowledge as produced from a certain geographical
location, in a disciplinary tradition and by human bodies, but also, of
course, at a certain time and within a certain history. She concludes that
social science as a discipline 1) ignores the nation but also colonialism and
2) naturalises and universalises the territorial and the human bodies that
knowledge is produced from via repression and exclusion. These
repressions and exclusions of places, historical events and people have
produced an academy and a perception of knowledge where bodies,
positions and rhetoric are considered foreign and alien, which also is why
the body is treated as more or less non-existent in traditional science.
According to Connell, these repressions and exclusions of knowledge and
bodies have also produced science that lacks the most fundamental parts of
science: namely, systematic work, critical thinking, and reflection.

Therefore we need tools like methodological nationalism and intersectionality

to help us get back on track again. From this perspective, it is more
beneficial to talk about methodological nationalism as defining processes
and practices instead of modes, since this shift of words underscores the
idea that methodological nationalism is something we do and learn to do,
and that this particular doing is related to certain forms of institutional
mechanisms and communities of practice (Lave and Wanger 1991;
36 Challenging the Bodies and Borders of Literature in Scandinavia

Bowker and Star 2005, 294). One could perhaps call them disciplinary
practices, stressing that this particular doing is related to the practice of
building and maintaining different scientific disciplines (Connell 2007).

I would also like to add one practice to the three above, namely the
practice of exclusion/inclusion. Studying methodological nationalism in
Swedish literary histories called my attention to the fact that the practice of
excluding different kinds of literatures and writers is an important part of
how methodological nationalism operates in this particular discourse
(Olsson 2013). Deciding what could or should be regarded as belonging to
a certain national body – in this case, Swedish literature – often turned into
a sorting process which excluded literature (narratives, books, or
publishing houses, for example) and authors (people/bodies/experiences)
from what was regarded as a “proper” part of the nation/national – which
also means that readers of the omitted literatures/authors and their
people/bodies/experiences were excluded from the history. In the same
process, literature and, by proxy, also writers and readers that in some way
or another could be described as “valuable” but having a somewhat
unclear relationship to the nation – usually literature produced or
published outside the specific geographic entity or written in another
language than the national – were included in the literary history. In these
processes different kinds of preconceived notions about what and who
belongs to and is valuable in the nation function as important principles in
the sorting process. An intersectional perspective can help us question and
analyse what people/bodies/experiences are excluded or included and what
effects these exclusions/inclusions have for the specific literary history and
for our understandings of national literary histories and the nation/national
in general. Even if it is quite obvious that not everybody or everything is
entitled to, as Butler and Spivak put it, sing the nation-state (2007), it is
nevertheless our responsibility to continue to ask these critical questions.

Reading the Bodies of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish

Literary Histories
During the period of 1980 to 2010 a number of different literary histories
in Scandinavia were produced and published, some of them with the direct
and explicit aim of correcting what were considered to be distorted literary
histories. An important example of a critical attempt of rereading and
rewriting literary history is Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria [The History
of Nordic Women’s Literature]. This joint-Nordic academic “grass-roots”
project from 1981 to 1998 focused on including women’s writings, their
 Annika Olsson 37

lives and experiences, into the literary history (Møller Jensen 1993; 2012)
and is described and analysed by Berglund (2013). Even if this feminist
project also had national literary history “sisters”, like Norsk
kvinnelitteraturhistorie [1988; The History of Norwegian Women’s
Literature] along with other histories that try to problematise the canon,
many of the literary histories published during the period can be described
as traditional literary histories produced with an explicit aim of telling one
nation’s literary history for the purpose of being used in higher education
and by ordinary readers outside academia. During the period, seven
histories were published that clearly label themselves as national literary
histories covering a longer historical period (or the “whole” history, so to
speak): Dansk litteraturhistorie [1984; Danish Literary History], Dansk
litteraturs historie [2007; The History of Danish Literature], Norges
litteratur [1981–1989; Norway’s Literature], Norges litteraturhistorie
[1995; The History of Norway’s Literature], Den svenska litteraturen
[1987; Swedish Literature], Litteraturens historia i Sverige [1987; The
History of Literature in Sweden], and Den svenska litteraturhistorien
[1996; The Swedish History of Literature]. In order to contrast and make
visible some of the problems discussed, this article also includes literary
histories that in some way or another question the more traditional
framework.

The oldest literary history in my empirical material, Norges litteratur

(1981–1989), is a single-author literary history written by Willy Dahl. It
has no introduction of any kind but starts in medias res with a quote from
a poem published in 1815 describing the urgent need (and also the good
economics) for Norwegian literature produced and published at that
particular time when Norway broke away from Denmark. On one hand it
also starts with a discussion of what it means to be a nation and the
relationship between literature and the creation of the nation-state, but the
text does not include an explicit discussion focusing on why it is important
to have a national literary history and what Norway and Norwegian means.
However, a meta-reflective text written by the author is part of the literary
history and included in the last volume as a post scriptum (Dahl 1989,
333–8). Here the author discusses the perspective from which he writes
and also includes some of the critiques that have been raised about him
and the project. He states that he has chosen to write a different kind of
literary history, one that is a clear attempt to follow in the footsteps of
Robert Jauss, one that discusses different kinds of problems throughout the
book and that focuses on literature (which means fiction) as a medium.
Still, there is no explicit discussion on, for example, what it means to write
38 Challenging the Bodies and Borders of Literature in Scandinavia

this kind of national literary history in regards to our understanding of the

nation or what kind of literature/authors are included.

The extensive project Dansk litteraturhistorie (1984), supported by the

Danish Research Foundation and published in nine volumes, lacks an
introduction or a foreword where the guiding principles of the project are
discussed – quite astonishing considering its close relationship to the
academic community.3 The very short preface just states that the literary
history was planned, written and critically discussed collectively by the 47
authors that have written this history. Although the history includes an
extensive bibliography and an index (Volume 9), this lack of guiding
principles means that the reader is left on his or her own to answer all
questions related to what has been included in the literary history and why.
The first volume starts with a rune stone and a discussion about where to
look for the oldest Danish literature and how to understand it. It argues
that Old Norse literature is where to start. The same argument is repeated
in a note on “What is Danish?” about one hundred pages into the history.
Here it is made clear that there is not much “old” literature that really can
be labelled Danish, but in order to understand the development of Danish
literature it is important to know about Old Norse literature (Lönnroth
1984, 13, 94). These portions of the text make clear some of the guiding
principles, but they are stated as definitive conclusions, not questioned or
problematised.

Another huge project, Den svenska litteraturen (1987), published in seven

volumes and, like Dansk litteraturhistorie, written by a large number of
literary scholars and critics, begins with a chapter that clearly states the
impossibility of writing and publishing a literary history, written by the
editors Lars Lönnroth and Sven Delblanc (Lönnroth and Delblanc 1987,
9–14). Due to changes in society as well as changes within the literary
field and the production and consumption of literature, this job is also
explained as more difficult than ever before. Among other factors, authors
and editors have to deal with a new understanding of the concept of
literature, a mass-media market dominated by television and popular
literature, new forms of literature related to the labour movement and the
women’s movement as well as an increase in the publication of books for
children and adolescents. In contrast to the Danish literary history

3
It would be immensely interesting to find out the reasons why some literary
histories lack a foreword/introduction while others include a discussion on the
guiding principles of the literary history by, for example, digging into archives or
interviewing people, but this was not possible within the scope of this article.
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
The first English records of scurvy at sea are in connexion with the
early voyages to Guinea for gold-dust[1125]. Mr John Lok sailed on
the second voyage to Guinea, on October 11, 1554, his ships being
the ‘Trinitie,’ 140 tons, the ‘Bartholomew,’ 90 tons, and the ‘John
Evangelist,’ 140 tons. After trading some months on the African
coast the ships sailed for home: “There died of our men at this last
voyage about twenty and four, whereof many died at their return
into the clime of the cold regions, as between the islands of Azores
and England.” The disease is not named; but it is probable from
what follows that it was scurvy.
The next voyage to Guinea was Towrson’s first, in October 1555,
from Newport, Isle of Wight, in the ‘Hart’ and the ‘Hind;’ the death
of only one man is mentioned; he died “in his sleep” on March 29;
by the 7th May, the provisions were so reduced that the ships put in
on the coast of Ireland to purchase milk and two sheep from the
wild kernes, paying in gold-dust.
In Towrson’s second voyage there is no word of sickness; but in his
third voyage in 1577, it is a prominent topic of the narrative. The
vessels ‘Minion,’ ‘Christopher’ and ‘Tiger’ left Plymouth on January
30, 1577. On the 8th of May, “all our cloth in the ‘Minion’ being sold,
I called the company together to know whether they would tarry the
sale of the cloth taken in the prize at this place or no: they answered
that in respect of the death of some of their men, and the present
sickness of 20 more, they would not tarry, but repair to the other
ships, of whom they had heard nothing since April 27.” Having at
length bartered for gold until the natives would barter no longer, the
three ships bore up for home. On July 24 the master of the ‘Tiger’
came aboard the ‘Minion’ and reported that “his men were so weak
and the ship so leak that he was not able to keep her above the
water.” A muster held of all the three crews the same day showed
that there were not above 30 sound men in them. On September 3,
there being only six men in the ‘Tiger’ who could work, the gold and
stores were taken out of her, and she was abandoned. On October
6, when off the coast of Portugal, the ‘Christopher’ reported herself
so weak that she was not able to keep the sea. The ‘Minion’
promised to attend her into Vigo; but a fair wind springing up, she
signalled that she was off for home, whereupon the ‘Christopher’
followed. On October 16, a great south-westerly storm arose; the
men in the ‘Minion’ were not able, from weakness, to handle the
sails, which were blown away: however, they made shift to reach the
Isle of Wight on October 20, nothing more being said of the
‘Christopher.’
The English voyages to Guinea for gold-dust were shortly followed
by the three expeditions of John Hawkins in 1562, 1564 and 1567 to
the West coast of Africa for negro slaves to be sold to the Spaniards
in Hispaniola and Cuba and on the Spanish Main[1126]. Only a brief
summary remains of the first voyage, in which nothing is said of
sickness; in the second, the negroes, at least, appear to have
suffered on the somewhat long passage across the tropical belt,
especially from want of water; and the third was so calamitous in
various ways that Hawkins himself wrote of it: “If all the miseries
and troublesome affairs of this sorrowful voyage should be perfectly
and thoroughly written, there should need a painful man with his
pen, and as great a time as he had that wrote the lives and deaths
of the martyrs.” Little or nothing is said of one class of martyrs in the
business—the negroes, of whom the ships carried four to five
hundred. English lives were lost in the kidnapping raids, from
poisoned arrows, it was thought, the wounded dying “in strange sort
with their mouths shut some ten days before they died, and after
their wounds were whole.” It was on the return from the Gulf of
Mexico, more than a year out from England, that the sickness on
board was worst. They cleared the Bahamas channel on November
16, 1568, after which, “growing near to the cold country, our men
being oppressed with famine, died continually, and they that were
left grew into such weakness that we were scarcely able to manage
our ship” (the ‘Jesus’ of Lubeck, 700 tons). They put in at Ponte
Vedra, near Vigo, on December 31, but the fresh provisions that they
got turned to their hurt: “our men with excess of fresh meat grew
into miserable diseases and died a great part of them.” Twelve fresh
hands shipped at Vigo enabled the vessels to reach the nearest
English haven at Mount’s Bay in Cornwall.
Meanwhile we obtain some glimpses of seafaring among the
Portuguese, who had now in the middle of the 16th century a
regular trade to the Indies, established by Vasco de Gama’s route
round the Cape of Good Hope. Perhaps the most famous of these
records is that of the voyage of St Francis Xavier from Lisbon to Goa
in the spring of 1540. The expedition with which he took passage
carried, it is said, a regiment of a thousand men to reinforce the
garrison of Goa; during the voyage the Jesuit apostle “rendered to
the diseased services too revolting to be described, and lived among
the dying and the profligate, the unwearied minister of consolation
and of peace[1127].” After five months the ships arrived at
Mozambique, by which time Xavier and many more were suffering
from fever. Goa was not reached until thirteen months out from the
Tagus. A more familiar narrative of the same voyage of the
Portuguese ships a generation later is given by an English youth,
Thomas Stevens, in a letter written home to his father, a citizen of
London, shortly after arriving at Goa. Both in its generalities and in
its particulars this excellent letter will serve to measure the
prevalence of scurvy, flux, and fever in the earlier period of the East
Indian trade by the Cape[1128].
The five ships left Lisbon on April 5, 1579, the solemnity being
marked by the firing of ordnance and the braying of trumpets. In the
ships, “besides shipmen and soldiers, there were a great number of
children, which in the seas bear out better than men; and no marvel,
when that many women also pass very well.” After a passage along
the Guinea coast, made tedious by calms and head winds, they
rounded the Cape of Good Hope on July 29. From that point in the
voyage the Portugal ships were wont to follow one or other of two
routes according to the lateness of the season—either the route by
the Mozambique Channel, in which case they were able to get fruits
and fresh provisions, or the route along more southern parallels for a
time, and passing to the east of Madagascar[1129]. In the latter case,
“by reason of the long navigation and want of food and water, they
fall into sundry diseases, their gums wax great and swell, and they
are fain to cut them away, their legs swell, and all the body
becometh sore and so benumbed that they cannot stir hand nor
foot, and so they die for weakness. Others fall into fluxes and agues,
and so die thereby.
“And this way it was our chance to make; and though we had more
than one hundred and fifty sick, there died not past seven-and-
twenty, which loss they esteemed not much in respect of other
times.”
The ships went greatly out of their course, having sighted the island
of Socotra at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden, and did not arrive at
Goa until October 24, 202 days from Lisbon without calling
anywhere.
The first of the long English voyages beyond the Line was Sir Francis
Drake’s famous circumnavigation from November 15, 1577, to
September 26, 1580[1130]. Drake must have lost many of his men in
those three years, but there is nothing in the narrative to show that
they perished of disease. The expedition was by way of the Straits of
Magellan, and was mainly given up to plundering the Spaniards on
the coasts of Chili and Peru. Drake set out for home loaded with
treasure by way of the Philippines and the Cape of Good Hope. It is
not until the narrative brings us to a small island between Ternate
and Celebes that we hear of sickness; they graved the ship there
and remained twenty-six days, during which the “sickly, weak and
decayed” recovered their strength, a large species of crayfish found
on the island being “very good and restoring meat, whereof we had
experience.” But even Drake, with all his systematic care and
resource, was destined in after years to have a share of the common
sickly experience at sea, and to find disease a more potent enemy
than the Spaniard.
Remarkable Epidemic in Drake’s Fleet 1585-6.
Drake’s next great expedition after his circumnavigation was in 1585,
with six Queen’s ships and some nineteen others, carrying 2,300
men. A large number of private adventurers had a money interest in
the enterprise, which had for its object to plunder Spanish towns in
the West Indies and the Spanish Main and to capture the treasure at
the isthmus of Panama on its way to Spain. The fleet experienced
one of the most remarkable epidemics in the whole history of
sickness[1131].
Having left Plymouth on September 14, 1585, they arrived at the
island of St Jago, in the Cape de Verde group, on November 16.
More than a thousand men were landed, and were marched up the
steep and broken ground to a hill overlooking the capital, which
stood in a narrow valley, with high cliffs on the east and west and
the Atlantic open before it at some distance on the south. The place
was surrounded by a wall, and defended by fifty pieces of brass
ordnance; but no resistance was offered, and the English marched in
to find the inhabitants fled farther inland. On the 17th November,
the town was quartered out for the lodging of the whole army, which
remained there for ten days or a fortnight (there are inconsistent
dates), taking such spoils as the place yielded (wine, oil, meal and
“trash” of the Portuguese trade to the Indies). After a week, when
no one had come to ransom the town, Drake set out with 600 men
to the village or town of St Domingo, twelve miles inland, with the
hope of finding the governor and the bishop; but, finding no one, he
marched his men back again the same evening. On November 26
the whole force was re-embarked, all the houses in the capital as
well as in the country round were set fire to, the port of Playa, a few
miles to the westward, was also burned, and on the same night the
ships weighed anchor from the latter, and stood away to the south-
west. They had filled their water-casks from a pool, near the
seashore, formed by the small stream which runs through the capital
and descends the southern declivity. Nothing is said of sickness
during the occupation of St Jago; there seems to have been some
lax discipline, (owing to the mixed character of the expedition),
which Drake quickly remedied.
The ships were only eighteen days in crossing the Atlantic to
Dominica, a distance of some forty meridians. In the midst of that
quick sailing along the edge of the tropical belt of ocean, with the
steady north-east trade wind behind them, the season the beginning
of December and the climate the most delightful and most refreshing
on the globe, the ships were visited suddenly with the fury of a
deadly pestilential fever, of which the following is the account by a
captain of the land-forces on board:
“We were not many days at sea but there began among our people
such mortality as in a few days there were dead two or three
hundred men. And until some seven or eight days after our coming
from St Jago there had not died any one man of sickness in all the
fleet. The sickness showed not his infection wherewith so many
were stroken until we were departed thence; and then seized our
people with extreme hot burning and continual agues whereof very
few escaped with life, and yet those for the most part not without
great alteration and decay of their wits and strength for a long time
after. In some that died were plainly showed the small spots which
are often found upon those that be infected with the plague.”
From Dominica the ships sailed to St Christopher, on which island
Drake disembarked his whole force, and cleaned and aired his ships,
according to an excellent practice which he had followed also in his
great circumnavigation. Some days of Christmas having been thus
spent ashore, “to refresh our sick people,” the voyage was resumed
to Hispaniola. Deaths continued to occur, from the same disease as
at first, both among officers and men, and so continued for many
weeks. However, they were able to land some 1000 or 1200 men on
Hispaniola, and to carry the city of San Domingo by assault. The
fleet then sailed southwards along the coast of the mainland to
Cartagena, which was captured in turn, and in like manner held to
ransom.
It is at this part of the narrative that we next hear of the infection in
the fleet:
“We stayed here six weeks [from middle of January to end of
February, 1586], and the sickness with mortality, before spoken of,
still continued among us, though not with the same fury as at the
first. And such as were touched with the said sickness, escaping
death, very few or almost none could recover their strength; yea,
many of them were much decayed in their memory, insomuch that it
was grown an ordinary judgment, when one was heard to speak
foolishly, to say he had been sick of the calentura, which is the
Spanish name of that burning ague; for, as I told you before, it is a
very burning and pestilent ague.”
Then follows the Spanish theory of the calentura, which may or may
not be rightly applied to the deadly epidemic that broke out
suddenly in the English ships in mid ocean:
“The original cause thereof is imputed to the evening or first night
air, which they term la serena, wherein they say, and hold very firm
opinion, that whoso is then abroad in the open air shall certainly be
infected to the death, not being of the Indian or natural race of
those country people. By holding their watch our men were thus
subjected to the infectious air, which at St Jago was most dangerous
and deadly of all other places. With the inconvenience of continual
mortality, we were forced to give over our intended enterprize, etc.”
The land-captains having been consulted by Drake, on February 27,
1586, advised that the expedition should go home from Cartagena,
instead of attempting to capture the treasure at Panama. In their
memorandum they wrote: “And being further advised of the
slenderness of our strength, whereunto we be now reduced, as well
in respect of the small number of able bodies, as also not a little in
regard of the slack disposition of the greater part of those which
remain, very many of the better minds and men being either
consumed by death, or weakened by sickness and hurts, etc.” The
voyage to England was accordingly begun; St Augustine in Florida
was captured by the way, and the struggling colony in Virginia, the
first sent out by Raleigh, was taken up and brought back, and
Portsmouth reached on July 28. “We lost some 750 men in the
voyage, above three parts of them only by sickness.” The names are
given of eight captains, four lieutenants, and seven masters, who
had died; and there were some other officers dead unnamed. When
the ransoms of San Domingo and Cartagena came to be divided, the
venture must have been found as unprofitable to the shareholders
as it had been disastrous to officers and men.
The Spanish name calentura, by which the fever in the fleet is
described, was probably used generically for various kinds of fever in
the tropics. But of this fever in particular, we have some details not
without diagnostic value. It was doubtless contracted at St Jago in
the Cape de Verde islands; it broke out suddenly in mid ocean after
some seven or eight days sailing before the wind, in a delightful
climate, which points to the regular incubation of an infective virus,
received by hundreds of men when they were last ashore; the
mortality was enormous; the symptoms were those of a burning
fever; and in some cases there were small spots or petechiae like
those often seen in the plague. It was clearly a febrile form of
pestilential infection, and, as few recovered, it must be considered to
have had a death-rate such as typhus has rarely had, and such as
yellow fever has commonly had. Nothing is said of the black vomit,
the haemorrhages, and the saffron colour of skin and eyes, which
are distinctive of yellow fever[1132]. On the other hand there is a
remarkable after-effect mentioned in both the passages quoted, the
loss of memory, impairment of wits, and appearance of foolishness,
which made “the calenture” a bye-word in the fleet. I shall not
venture to say what the infection was; but it seems tolerably certain
that it was contracted by the English during their occupation of the
capital town of St Jago. More recent visitors to the Cape de Verde
islands have remarked upon their towns and villages as fever-traps,
and have pointed to the source of the fever; it is not malaria, or the
mere climatic influence, but a pestilential emanation from spots of
soil long inhabited by mankind, both black and white, and so
situated in cups of the hills as to retain and multiply the filth-ferment
in them. According to all analogy, the emanations from such a soil
would be felt most by strangers not inured to them, and most of all
by men of another stock and from other latitudes[1133].

Sicknesses of Voyages, continued:

Management of Scurvy.
The expedition to Virginia which returned in 1586 with Drake’s ships
homeward bound from the Spanish Main, was the first sent out by
Raleigh with the intention of settling, an earlier voyage in 1584
having been made to explore the country. It is in connexion with
Raleigh’s second colony (and fourth expedition) in 1587 that we hear
of disastrous sickness[1134]. Having left 118 people to inhabit the
country, the two larger ships sailed for home on August 27 of the
same year. On board the “fly-boat,” the provisions fell short, the
water turned stinking, officers and men died, and the vessel was
navigated with difficulty to the west coast of Ireland. When they
reached Portsmouth, they found the admiral arrived there three
weeks before them, but with an equally disastrous experience:
“Ferdinando the master, with all his company were not only come
home without any purchase, but also in such weakness by sickness
of their chiefest men that they were scarce able to bring their ship
into harbour, but were forced to let fall anchor without.”
The following year, 1588, was made memorable in the English
annals of the sea by the defeat of the Spanish Armada. There was
much sickness in both fleets. As regards the English ships, a writer
who has had special access to original documents says[1135]:
“We little think, when we peruse the melancholy tale of disease,
starvation and shame, so needlessly undergone by the heroic
champions of England’s liberty against the invading might of Spain,
from what obscure and insignificant causes the difficulties and
hardships of the Island seamen may have chiefly arisen”—namely
the peculation of officials, the mouldering rations, empty magazines,
and the like. In the ships of the Spanish fleet the infection was like
that of the plague itself; the main body of the expedition, fifty sail,
reached Corunna, Santander and St Sebastian with such infection
among the ten thousand men on board, that the inhabitants shut
their houses against them.
Two of the heroes of that fight, Drake and Hawkins, met their death
by sickness off the Spanish Main in 1595-6. The expedition,
consisting of 2500 men in six Queen’s ships and twenty-one others,
left Plymouth on August 28, 1595[1136]. Only the deaths of officers
are mentioned in the narrative, but of these there seem to have
been a good many, when the ships were in the Caribbean Sea.
Hawkins died off Porto Rico on November 12. On December 7, Mr
Yorke, captain of the ‘Hope,’ died of sickness, on January 15, captain
Plat died of sickness, and then Sir Francis Drake began to keep his
cabin and to complain of a scouring or flux: he died on January 28,
off Porto Bello. On the 27th died captain Jonas of the ‘Delight,’
captain Egerton, and James Wood, chief surgeon of the fleet, out of
the ‘Garland.’ On the 28th died Abraham Kendall out of the ‘Saker.’
Several of the ships were sunk so that their men might go to the
Queen’s ships, which were short of hands. A muster on February 6
showed in the whole fleet “two thousand sick and whole,” or five
hundred fewer than had sailed. There was some loss of life in
encounters with the enemy, but much more from disease.
Of the filibustering cruises or expeditions to the East by the South
American route, there remain to be mentioned two by Thomas
Cavendish, and one at some length by Richard Hawkins, before we
come to the establishment of regular English trade to the East Indies
by the Portuguese route round the Cape of Good Hope. Cavendish’s
first voyage[1137] by the Straits of Magellan was from Plymouth, 25
July, 1586, with three ships (240 tons in all) carrying 125 men.
Touching on the west coast of Africa, they went ashore and took
lemons from the trees. Off the coast of Brazil in November and
December two men died “of the disease called scorbuto, which is an
infection of the blood and the liver.” Arrived at the Straits of Magellan
they found twenty-three Spaniards living on shell-fish, “which were
all that remained of four hundred which were left there [to found a
colony] in these Straits of Magellan, three years before, all the rest
being dead with famine.” They were only too glad to hasten from
this place, Port Famine, “for the noysome stench and vile savour
wherewith it was infected through the contagon of the Spaniards’
pined and dead carkeises.” In one of Cavendish’s own ships, on
February 21, 1588, when among the East Indian islands, Captain
Havers died of “a most severe and pestilent ague, which held him
furiously some seven or eight days. Moreover presently after his
death, myself [Pretty, the narrator] with divers others in the ship fell
marvellously sick, and so continued in very great pain for the space
of three weeks or a month, by reason of the extreme heat and
intemperature of the climate.”
One might guess that these were cases of ship-fever (or calenture);
but in Cavendish’s last voyage we meet with a strange sickness
which will perhaps baffle all nosological conjecture. This voyage, like
the first, was intended for the East Indies by way of the Straits of
Magellan[1138]. The three tall ships and two barks, having sailed from
Plymouth on August 26, 1591, never got through the Straits; they
were still within their recesses in April, 1592, many men having “died
with cursed famine and miserable cold,” and sick men having been
put ashore into the woods in the snow. The narrative (by John
Lane), then follows the fortunes of one of the ships, the ‘Desire.’
Landing at Port Desire, in Patagonia, they found scurvy-grass
growing, which they ate with oil: “This herb did so purge the blood
that it took away all kind of swellings, of which many [had] died, and
restored us to perfect health of body, so that we were in as good
case as when we came first out of England.” There also they took on
board 14,000 penguins, which they had dried on the rocks, mostly
without salt; and sailed northwards on December 22. With only 27
men surviving out of 76, they left the coast of Brazil at Cape Frio
(near Rio de Janeiro), and then began their more singular
experience of disease.
“After we came near unto the sun, our dried penguins began to
corrupt, and there bred in them a most loathsome and ugly worm of
an inch long. This worm did mightily increase, and devour our
victuals;” it devoured everything except iron,—clothes, boots, shirts,
even the ship’s timbers! “In this woeful case, after we had passed
the equinoctial toward the North, our men began to fall sick of such
a monstrous disease as I think the like was never heard of: for in
their ankles it began to swell, from thence in two days it would be in
their breasts, so that they could not draw their breath, and then fell
into their cods, and their cods and yardes did swell most grievously
and most dreadfully to behold, so that they could neither stand, lie,
nor goe. Whereupon our men grew mad with grief. Our captain
[John Davis] with extreme anguish of his soul was in such woeful
case that he desired only a speedy end, and though he were scarce
able to speak for sorrow, yet he persuaded them to patience.... For
all this, divers grew raging mad, and some died in most loathsome
and furious pain. It were incredible to write our misery as it was;
there was no man in perfect health but the captain, and one boy....
To be short, all our men died except sixteen [i.e., eleven died of the
survivors after Cape Frio] of which there were but five able to
move.” Those five worked the ship into Berehaven (Bantry Bay) on
June 11, 1593, and there ran her ashore.
The remarkable epidemic on board the ‘Desire,’ among men living
upon dried penguin infested with worms, was probably not scurvy,
or at least not all scurvy: the dropsy and dyspnœa suggest one of
the two forms of beri-beri, of a peculiarly severe type. The co-
existence of worms in the dried food may lead one to think of a
parasitic malady such as that caused by Anchylostoma duodenale,
which has also an anasarcous or œdematous character. But the
diagnosis of beri-beri appears to be far more likely. That epidemic,
however we interpret it, must rank among the curiosities of the
history. But, in the next that we come to, the sickness on board the
‘Daintie,’ Richard Hawkins master, on a voyage in 1593 through the
Straits of Magellan, the disease is typical scurvy; and the
observations on sea-scurvy by Hawkins himself are among the best
that we have for the period, and, indeed, until long after the
Elizabethan period[1139].
The ‘Daintie,’ a nearly new ship of 300 to 400 tons, weighed anchor
from Blackwall on April 8, 1593. She was deeply laden with
merchandise for trade and accompanied by a victualler, of 100 tons,
the ‘Hawk.’ It was not until June 12, that they got away from
Plymouth. They put in at the Cape de Verde islands, about whose
climate and health Hawkins makes some observations already
quoted. Sailing thence they had come within three or four degrees
of the Line, when scurvy broke out:
“My company within a few days began to fall sick of a disease which
seamen are wont to call the scurvie; and seemeth to be a kind of
dropsie, and raigneth most in this climate of any that I have heard
or read of in the world, though [it is found] in all seas. It possesseth
all those of which it takes hold with a loathsome sloathfulnesse, that
even to eate they would be content to change with sleepe and rest,
which is the most pernicious enemie in this sickness that is known. It
bringeth with it a great desire to drink, and causeth a general
swelling of all parts of the body, especially of the legs, and gums;
and many times the teeth fall out of the jaws without pain. The
signs to know this disease in the beginning are divers,—by the
swelling of the gums, by denting of the flesh of the legs with a
man’s finger, the pit remaining without filling up in a good space;
others show it with their laziness; others complain of the crick of the
back, etc., all which are for the most part certain tokens of the
infection. The cause is thought to be the stomack’s feebleness by
change of air in intemperate climates, of diet in salt meats, boiled
also in salt water, and corrupted sometimes; the want of exercise,
also, either in persons or elements, as in calms.”
Hawkins then recalls the experience of the Queen’s fleet in 1590, at
the Azores, the ships being in calm weather for six months: “in
which voyage, towards the end thereof, many of every ship (saving
the ‘Nonpereli’ which was under my charge and had only one man
sick in all the voyage) fell sick of this disease and began to die
apace.”
Hawkins wrote out the account of his 1593 voyage some time after,
and did not print it until 1622; but it may be supposed that the
views about scurvy therein expressed were the same that he held
and acted upon in his earlier life[1140]. Thus his remarks upon the
prevention and cure of scurvy, about to be given, may be taken to
stand for the practical wisdom or sagacity of the Elizabethan period.
The ship should be kept clean, vinegar should be sprinkled and tar
burned. In hot latitudes salt meats should be shunned, and
especially salt fish. Salt water should not be used to dress the meat,
nor to wash shirts in; nor should the men sleep in their wet clothes.
The crews should be set to various exercises, and encouraged to
various pastimes. At this point he seems to feel that he is a layman
giving medical advice, and interpolates:
“And I wish that some learned men would write of it, for it is the
plague of the sea and the spoil of mariners. Doubtless it would be a
work worthy of a worthy man, and most beneficial for our country,
for in twenty years (since I have used the sea) I dare take upon me
to give account of ten thousand men consumed with this disease.”
The learned man was forthcoming in due course, in the person of
John Woodall, surgeon-general to the East India Company; and we
shall see what he made of it. Meanwhile, in default of professional
guidance, we may hear Hawkins himself:
“That which I have seen most fruitful for this sickness is sour
oranges and lemons, and a water called Dr Stevens his water, of
which I carried but little, and it took end quickly, but gave health to
those that used it. The oyle of vitry [vitriol] is beneficial—two drops
in a draught of water with a little sugar. But the principal of all is the
air of the land; for the sea is natural for fishes, and the land for
men. And the oftener a man can have his people to land, not
hindering his voyage, the better it is and the profitablest course he
can take to refresh them.”
Hawkins, as well as his contemporaries, as we shall see, knew what
lime-juice could do for scurvy, and knew also the limit of its powers;
it was useful, as he had himself found; but much else was needed to
ward off scurvy. After experience showed clearly enough that some
commanders with the same stores as others could carry their crews
through a long voyage without scurvy; Hawkins himself, in the
‘Nonpareil’ in 1590, had only one man sick of it, while it was general
in the fleet. In the voyage of 1593, for all his knowledge and
resource, he appears to have found circumstances too hard for him.
His crew showed their bad habits while the ship lay at Plymouth; as
in Lancaster’s experience two years before, the evil habits of sailors
told upon their constitutions, so that they became an easy prey to
monotonous living at sea. Scurvy broke out when they were within
three or four degrees of the Line: “The sickness was fervent, every
day there died more or less.” The ship’s course was accordingly
turned westward, although they were too far south to benefit by the
north-east trade wind; and in the end of October they came to the
coast of Brazil at Santos, four months and a half out from Plymouth.
At Santos they obtained 200 or 300 oranges and lemons, and a few
hens; there were so many men sick that there were not above three
or four oranges or lemons to a share: “Coming aboard of our ships
there was great joy amongst my company, and many with the sight
of the oranges and lemons seemed to recover heart.” It is the great
and unknown virtue of that fruit, he says, to be a certain remedy for
this infirmity. The rest of the voyage possesses no special interest for
us. The scurvy had “wasted more than half of my people;” so that
Hawkins took the crew and provisions out of the ‘Hawk,’ and burned
her. He left the Brazilian coast on December 18, passed the Straits of
Magellan, and after some filibustering on the Chilian and Peruvian
coasts, was captured by a Spanish ship, and sent home to Spain to
be ransomed.
Hawkins, it will have been remarked, was no bigoted “lime-juicer;”
although he knew the virtues of anti-scorbutic acids, he had a
correct apprehension of the need of cleanliness, dry clothing,
exercise, amusements and discipline, and if he had understood the
need of wind-sails for the ventilation of ’tween-decks, he would have
had as scientific a grasp of the whole question as Blane had two
centuries after. But in the end of the Tudor period, and in the Stuart
period, with abounding enterprise and national expansion, there was
little sense of the personal need of breathing space, whether in ships
or in houses. The number of souls on board, in proportion to a ship’s
tonnage, was twice or thrice as great as the Board of Trade now
allows. It was not only in long voyages, or in the monotony of
tropical calms, that scurvy was apt to invade a crew. The following
experience, on our own shores, is credible enough: In 1611 Purchas
was shown a letter from Newfoundland, giving an account of a
winter spent there, the writer taking credit to himself for the small
amount of scurvy among the men under him: in a company of 39
persons, only four were wanting in the spring; but, by way of
contrast, he recalls what happened at home in the year 1600[1141]:
“One Richard Fletcher, that is master pilot here, and a director of the
fishing, reported unto me that he was one of the company,
consisting of forty persons, that went in a drumbler of Ipswich called
the ‘Amitie,’ to the north of Ireland about eleven years ago from
London in the late Queen’s service under the charge of one Captain
Fleming, and continued there the space of two years. In which time
two and thirty died of the scurvie, and that only eight of them
returned home, whereof the said Richard Fletcher was one ...
notwithstanding that there were to be had fresh victuals and many
other helps, which their country [Newfoundland] as yet hath not, but
in good time may have.”
We have not yet come to any deliverance of the faculty on the
subject of scurvy; Hawkins appears to be giving merely his own
experience and reflections. Beside these we may here place the
contemporary observations and practice of the French laymen, which
are expressly at variance on some points with medical teaching.
Some time previous to 1609, Marc Lescarbot wrote an account of
‘the voyage of M. de Monts into New France;’ the expedition sailed
from Havre in March, 1604. Their first winter in Canada is thus
related[1142]:
In the meanwhile the cold and snows came upon them.... Many idle,
sluggish companions drank snow-water, not willing to take the pains
to cross the river. “Briefly, the unknown sicknesses like to those
described unto us by James Quartier in his relation, assailed us. For
remedies there was none to be found. In the meanwhile the poor
sick creatures did languish, pining away by little and little for want of
sweet meats, as milk or spoon meat for to sustain their stomachs,
which could not receive the hard meats, by reason of let, proceeding
from a rotten flesh which grew and overabounded within their
mouths; and when one thought to root it out, it did grow again in
one night’s space more abundantly than before.... There died of this
sickness thirty-six; and thirty-six or forty more that were stricken
with it recovered themselves by the help of the Spring, as soon as
the comfortable season appeared. But the deadly season for that
sickness is the end of January, the months of February and March,
wherein most commonly the sick do die, every one at his turn,
according to the time when they have begun to be sick; in such sort
that he which began to be ill in February and March may escape, but
he that shall overhaste himself, and betake him to his bed in
December and January, he is in danger to die in February and
March, or the beginning of April.... M. de Poutrincourt made a negro
to be opened that died of that sickness in our voyage, who was
found to have the inward parts very sound except the stomacke,
that had wrinkles as though they were ulcerated.”
Then follow Lescarbot’s views of the treatment and prevention of
scurvy. After advising to avoid “cold” meats without juices, gross and
corrupted, salted, “smoaky,” musty, raw and of an evil scent,
including dried fishes, he proceeds:
“I would not, for all that, be so scrupulous as the physicians, which
do put in the number of gross and melancholy meats, beeve’s flesh,
bear’s, wild boar’s and hog’s flesh (they might as well add unto them
beaver’s flesh, which notwithstanding we have found very good), as
they do amongst fishes the tons [tunnies], dolphins, and all those
that carry lard; among the birds the hernes, ducks and all other
water-birds; for, in being an over-curious observator of these things,
one might fall into the danger of starving. They place yet among the
meats that are to be shunned, bisket[1143], beans and pulse, the
often using of milk, cheese, the gross and harsh wine and that which
is too small, white wine, and the use of vinegar”
—just like our own great masters in prohibitory dietetics.
Lescarbot’s advice agrees on the whole with that of Sir R. Hawkins:
the men should be well shod and clothed, merriment should be
encouraged, and again:
“Good wine taken according to the necessity of nature, it is a
soveraigne preservative for all sickness, and particularly for this. The
young buds of herbs in the Spring time be also very soveraigne....
We have had some sick that have been (as it were) raised up from
death to life, for having eaten twice or thrice of a coolice made of a
cock.”
In the voyage of Sir Thomas Smith to Baffin’s Bay in 1616, the
treatment of scurvy by vegetable juices is mentioned: “Next day,
going ashore on a little island we found great abundance of scurvie
grass, which we boiled in beer, and so drank thereof, using it also in
sallet, with sorrel and orpen, which here groweth in abundance; by
means whereof, and the blessing of God, all our men within eight or
nine days shall gain perfect health, and so continue till our arrival in
England[1144].”
On the other hand, those who appear to have had the most correct
intuition of the teaching of the schools were the Red Indians.
Lescarbot says that, in the treatment of scurvy, “they use sweating
often.” Perhaps they had some dim notion of the doctrine of peccant
humours: at all events they clung to the alterative practice until long
after that date, with a tenacity second only to that of the European
faculty itself.

Scurvy in the East India Company’s Ships:

Professional Treatment.
Until the end of the Tudor period, scurvy had been only an
occasional incident of English voyages. But as soon as the regular
trade to the East begins, we find it a common experience.
The English voyages to the East Indies by the Cape route really
began in 1591, when Captain James Lancaster sailed first in
command of ships belonging to the Company of Merchant
Adventurers; but it was not until 1601 that he sailed again to the
East Indies in command of the first ships of the East India Company,
which had been formed the year before.
The three ships in 1591, the ‘Penelope,’ ‘Marchant Royal,’ and
‘Edward Bonaventure,’ cleared from Plymouth on April 10[1145]. They
crossed the Line on June 6, by which time two men were dead and
divers sick. In the tropics so much rain fell that “we could not keep
our men dry three hours together, which was an occasion of the
infection among them, and their eating of salt victuals, with the lack
of clothes to shift them.” On this first voyage, Lancaster began the
practice which was generally followed when the East India trade in
English ships became established; before attempting to double the
Cape of Good Hope, he refreshed his crews, who were weak and
sick in all three ships, by a sojourn ashore at the Bay of Saldanha, a
few leagues to the north of Table Bay. The voyage had already
lasted more than three months from Plymouth, and about six weeks
from the Line[1146].
At a muster on August 1, in the Bay of Saldanha, Lancaster found
that he had 198 men sound and whole, of whom he assigned 101 to
the ‘Penelope,’ and 97 to the ‘Edward Bonaventure,’ sending home
50 more or less unfit men in the ‘Royal Merchant.’ Scurvy, he says,
was the disease:
“Our soldiers, which have not been used to the sea, have best held
out, but our mariners dropt away, which in my judgment,
proceedeth of their evil diet at home.” The voyage was continued to
the East Indies, the next that we hear of the state of health being at
Penang in the beginning of June 1592, or some fourteen months
out. The men were then very sick and many fallen; the sick were
landed, and twenty-six died there, but not of scurvy, we may
surmise. They had now left but thirty-three men and one boy, “of
which not past twenty-two were found for labour and help.”
The two ships sailed for home from Point de Galle on December 8,
1592, and reached St Helena on April 3, 1593; one man was sick of
the scurvy, and another had been suffering from the flux for nine
months, but on the island both shortly recovered their perfect
health. Instead of reaching England, the ships were carried to the
West Indies, where, after an attempt to navigate them northwards,
they were wrecked, and the small remnants of their crews dispersed.
Lancaster’s first voyage for the East India Company in 1601[1147] was
“with foure tall shippes, to wit, the Dragon, the Hector, the
Ascension, and Susan, and a victualler called the Guest.” The
Company, founded in 1600, began with a capital of £72,000, which
was laid out in the purchase and outfit of the ships, and in loading
them with merchandise. The crews were as follow:

Dragon, 600 tons, 202 men.

Hector, 300 " 108 "
Ascension, 260 " 82 "
 Susan, — " 88 "
480
Guest, 130 tons.

Further, “in every of the said ships, three merchants to succeed one
the other, if any of them should be taken away by death”—a
sufficient indication of the risks of foreign trade.
The ships, having loaded in the Thames, sailed from Dartmouth on
April 18, 1601, and got clear of Tor Bay on the 22nd. On July 24,
two months from the Channel, they crossed the southern tropic. But
they had been so long under the Line that “many of our men fell
sick.” On August 1, in 30° S., they met the south-west wind, “to the
great comfort of all our people. For, by this time very many of our
men were fallen sick of the scurvy in all our ships, and, unless it
were in the general’s ship only, the others were so weak of men that
they could hardly handle the sails.” Headwinds again hindered their
course, and “now the few whole men we had began also to fall sick,
so that our weakness of men was so great that in some of the ships
the merchants took their turn at the helm and went into the top to
take in the top sails, as the common mariners did.” Lancaster at
length made Saldanha Bay, where he had landed to refresh his
crews on his first voyage round the Cape ten years before. The state
of three of the ships “was such that they was hardly able to let fall
an anchor to save themselves withall;” but “the general went aboard
of them and carried good store of men, and hoysed out their boats
for them.... And the reason why the general’s men stood better in
health than the men of other ships was this: he brought to sea with
him certain bottles of the juice of lemons, which he gave to each
one as long as it would last, three spoonfuls every morning fasting,
not suffering them to eat anything after it till noon. This juice
worketh much the better if the partie keepe short diet, and wholly
refrain salt meat, which salt meat, and long being at the sea, is the
only cause of the breeding of this disease. By this means the general
cured many of his men and preserved the rest, so that in this ship
(having the double of men that was in the rest of the ships) he had
not so many sick, nor lost so many men as they did, which was the
mercie of God to us all.”
At Saldanha Bay they bartered with the natives for an abundant
supply of fresh meat and other provisions, and in due time doubled
the Cape of Good Hope. On Christmas day, eight months out from
England, they put in to Antongil Bay, on the east side of Madagascar.
On landing they found a writing on the rocks that five Dutch ships
had sailed thence two months before, having “lost between 150 and
200 men while they roade in that place.” The English had a similar
experience in store for them: on board Lancaster’s ship, the master’s
mate, the preacher, the surgeon and some ten others, died; and, in
the vice-admiral’s ship, the master with other two. It was mostly the
flux that they died of, brought on by the drinking-water, or by the
excessive wetness of the season, or by “going open and cold in the
stomacke, which our men would often do when they were hot”
(Hawkins gives the latter reason for flux at the Cape de Verde
islands).
The references to scurvy before reaching the Cape, and to dysentery
in Madagascar, are all that is said of sickness in this first venture of
the East India Company. But in the accounts of the voyages which
regularly followed we hear a great deal of the loss of men at the
factories, or in the country trade, or on the voyage home, as well as
on the outward voyage[1148]. The Directors in London were naturally
well aware how greatly their ventures were imperilled and their
profits reduced by the enormous loss of men. Under their own eyes
ships would arrive in the mouth of the Channel with crews so
weakened that they had to be met at Scilly with help to navigate
them through the narrow seas to the Thames. By their
correspondence from abroad, they were frequently hearing of
artificers dying in their factories, of ships arriving out with so many
men dead, and of other ships cast away, partly by stress of weather
no doubt, but sometimes from inability of the crews to man them.
Accordingly we find that they were alive to the best means of
preventing “flux, scurvy, and fever.” Lancaster, as we have seen,
carried lime-juice on his first voyage for the Company in 1601. In the
Court minutes of August 13, 1607, the following were ordered to be
provided with expedition: “Lemon water, ‘alligant’ from Alicante, a
wine very fit for beverage and good against the flux, and old corn,
etc.” At the Court of Directors on December 10, 1614, there was
considered an “offer of Dr Burgis to present the Company with an
antidote against poison, scurvy, and other diseases to which people
are subject these long voyages: Sir Thomas Roe and Captain Keeling
to confer with him and report their opinions.” Trial was also to be
made of baking fresh bread at sea, with the grinding of corn, “an
exercise fit to preserve men in health.” The offer of Dr Burgis was
accepted; and on January 26, 1615, the minutes of the Court
mention “instructions in writing, and boxes of such things as are to
be used, for prevention of the flux, scurvy, and fever, prepared by Dr
Burgis, to be delivered to each ship; the cost, about £23, to be paid.”
In the minutes of the Court, November 22, 1619, there is reference
to another preventive of scurvy: “The fleet to be supplied with 15
tons of white wine, to be drunk at the Line, and the Cape, which is
used by the Dutch to preserve men from scurvy, and will refresh the
men and scour their maws, and open and cool as well as lemon
water”—the latter having been in all probability disliked or refused
by the men. In 1624, “the death of mariners” is a topic at the Court
of Directors; again, on October 15, 1626, the Court considers of the
great mortality from scurvy in the ‘Charles’ and ‘Hart,’ homeward
bound, and how to prevent it. Some were of opinion that lemon
water was very good, but Mr Styles related that tamarind was the
excellentest thing. However, there had been plenty of tamarinds
aboard the ships; and on Lieutenant Hill being called in, he testified
that the crews had all got tamarind, but they were all debauched
people.
John Woodall, surgeon to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, was at this
time surgeon-general to the East India Company, having medical
charge of their dockyard at Blackwall; his name appears in the Court
minutes as early as 1614. In 1617 he published his ‘Surgion’s Mate,’
“chiefly for the benefit of young sea-surgions imployed in the East
India companies affairs,” and dedicated it to Sir Thomas Smith,
himself a navigator, and then chairman of the Court of Directors.
This practical manual is largely occupied with the management of
fractures, dislocations, amputations, and the like, a part of his
subject wherein Woodall was thoroughly competent; but there
appears also in the title, “the cure of the scurvie, the fluxes of the
belly, of the collica and iliaca passio, tenasmus and exitus ani, the
callenture.” The section on scurvy, twenty-six pages long, is the one
that here concerns us. This was what Sir Richard Hawkins had
desired: “And I wish that some learned men would write of it, for it
is the plague of the sea and the spoil of mariners.” Woodall begins
by disclaiming learning: “A learned treatise befits not my pen.” But,
at all events, his was the voice of the faculty, and he plunges boldly
into pathology in the very first lines: “Scurvy is a disease of the
spleen, whereby it is sometimes wholly stopped” etc. Being a man of
much good sense, Woodall quickly leaves that line of remark, for a
time at least. He repeats all the familiar experience of Hawkins,
Lancaster, and the numerous captains of East Indiamen, with whom
he must have conversed many times (it does not appear that he had
himself sailed). He mentions the great benefit to the crews from
landing at the Cape, with the fresh air and food, scurvy being
thereby cured “without much other help.” He enforces the need of
changes of clothing, and other things in the regimen on board, just
as Hawkins and others were wont to do in practice. He is as clear on
the virtues of lime-juice as Lancaster, and copies somewhat closely
the practice of the latter in 1601: “each morning two or three
spoonfuls, and fast after it two hours”; his originality appearing in
the rider, grateful to seamen: “and if you add one spoonful of aqua
vitae thereto, to a cold stomach it is the better.” He mentions that a
“good quantity of juice of lemons is sent in each ship out of England,
by the great care of the merchants, and intended only for the relief
of every poor man in his need.” The ship’s surgeon is advised to lay
in a store of fresh lemons and oranges where they were to be had
on the voyage, and of tamarinds at Bantam.
So far, Woodall merely sets down what every shipmaster knew as to
the things that bring on scurvy, the best regimen to keep it off, and
the extraordinarily rapid curative effect of lime-juice and of change
to land air and fresh food. But there was a certain professional
doctrine of scurvy, and a treatment of it secundum artem, namely
the wisdom of learned men which Hawkins had called for; and we
have now to see what that was, according to Woodall. His pathology
is that of “obstructions,” a curious fancy of the learned[1149].
The spleen, said Woodall in his opening lines, is the chief seat of
obstruction; but on resuming the pathology, he proceeds to
obstructions also of the liver and brain:
“But it is plain that this grief is a lazy foul disease with obstructions
of the liver, or spleen, or both; as also it appeareth that the head is
much diseased, and that there is great obstructions in the brain, for
that the eyes not only look evil coloured, but also the gums putrefy,
and the teeth grow loose, and all the sinewy parts of the body bear
their part in the disease, for the shrinking and withering of the
sinews, with the great pains the party hath, declareth no less” (p.
180).
This theoretical pathology Woodall supports by an appeal to morbid
anatomy:
“Also it is manifest that divers of those which have been opened
after death have had their livers utterly rotted”-others having their
livers much swollen, and the spleen swollen, others full of water,
others their lungs putrefied and stunk while they have lived, (which
last may have been an incorrect inference from the foul state of the
mouth).
Such being the pathology of the disease, he comes next to the
indications of cure; and these he takes from “a famous writer,
Johannes Echthius.” They are:
1. The opening of obstructions.
2. The evacuating of offending humours.
3. The altering the property of the humours.
4. The comforting and corroborating the parts late diseased.
The order of treatment, lege artis, is accordingly as follows: the
administration of a clyster or clysters; the opening of a vein, if
strong (“but beware of taking too much blood away at once”); next
day after the bleeding, “if he can bear it,” give him pills of
euphorbium or gamboge; and lastly, “if you see cause,” certain days
after you have given of any of your former laxatives, you may give a
sweat to the patient in his bed. Thus the indications from the
pathology would be fulfilled—opening of obstructions, evacuating of
ill humours, and altering the property of the humours. It should be
said for Woodall that his practice was better than his theory. Thus,
he cautions the young dogmatists who sailed as surgeons in East
Indiamen, not to carry their principles too far; he has heard that
they are somewhat fond of the lancet, and he cautions them not to
take too much blood at sea, as excessive depletion “makes the
disease worse;” he cautions them also as to the use of gamboge.
We may now proceed with a few more illustrations of what the
Company’s ships were actually experiencing during the period that
those questions were before the Court of Directors[1150].
In the sixth voyage for the Company, under the command of Sir H.
Middleton, the captain of the ‘Darling’ and three of his merchants
died at Tecoa, and most of the men were ill. In the eighth voyage,
when homeward bound between the Cape and St Helena in the
month of June, many of the men fell ill with scurvy, and the ship had
to come in to Waterford instead of the Thames. A similar experience
befell Captain Thomas Best in the ‘Dragon’ and ‘Hosiander,’ carrying
together 380 persons. Having left Gravesend on February 1, 1612,
he completed his trading in the Indies, and arrived in the Thames on
June 15, 1614, six months from Bantam. The scurvy in this voyage
comes in towards the end. On March 4, 1614, “I did set sail in the
roade of Saldanha; yet notwithstanding our short passage, having
been from Santa Helena but two monethes and nine days, the one
half or more of our company are laid up [on June 4] of the scurvie
and two dead of it. Yet we had plentie of victuals, as beef, bread,
wine, rice, oil, vinegar, sugar; and all these without allowance. Note
that all our men that are sick have taken their sickness since we fell
with Flores and Corvo. For since that time we have had it very cold,
especially in two great storms.... From the Cape of Good Hope to the
islands of Flores and Corvo I had not one man sick.” While in the
Malay Archipelago they had buried twenty-five men at one place.
On November 3, 1618, the Directors have letters from two of their
captains at the Cape, of July 6 and 7, with news of their arrival there
on June 26, and the loss or sickness of many men, partly through
the stinking beer, the tainted beef, the lack of fresh provisions at the
Cape, and the want of warm clothes. A letter of February 25, 1619,
announces the arrival of the ‘Peppercorn’ in Bantam roads: A great
many men had died in the ten-months’ voyage between England and
Bantam; putrefied beef and pork, “not man’s meat,” the chief cause
of sickness. When they arrived at Bantam, not six men able to work;
the whole fleet in the like distress. Twenty-five men in all dead or
drowned. A letter from Batavia, January 11, 1622, says the master
of the ‘Anne’ and 14 men of the fleet were dead: “so many men are
deceased that they have not enough to man all the ships now in the
roads.” The ‘Diamond’ sailed from England on October 8, 1621, and
after a “long and tedious voyage” arrived at Jacatra previous to
November 24, 1622: enclosed are the accounts of those men who
have died, and nine wills. Another letter from Batavia, sometime in
1623, covers an “abstract of the men deceased in the ships.”
On March 28, 1624, the ‘Royal James,’ with five others, sailed from
the Downs; she called at Saldanha Bay, and arrived on or before
November 15, at Swally bar, Batavia; the bread had been very bad,
the water too little, the beef not fit for men; have enclosed the
names of those deceased. The ‘Jonas,’ also arrived out at Batavia on
November 15, appears to have been one of the five others; she
called at Saldanha Bay on July 19; “the wholesomeness of the air
and the herb baths caused the most part of their sick men to recover
in ten days from the scurbeck.” In June, 1625, the ‘Anne’ had been
at Mocha for eight months in great distress, with most part of her
men dead and the ship ready to founder.
Writing on October 13, 1625, from Batavia to the East India
Company in London, Governor Hawley says that the ‘London’ had
arrived out on August 23, with loss of 36 men, and 80 sick. She
reported the ‘Discovery’ to have left the Cape for St Helena, having
lost 21 men; two other ships, the ‘Moon’ and ‘Ruby’ had their crews
“in remarkable health.” On September 14, the ‘Swallow’ arrived out,
having lost only 3 men. Of 46 men shipped in the ‘Abigail’ out of
England, all were dead but 5, in her coasting voyages upon Sumatra.
Most of the workmen and soldiers sent in the ‘London’ had arrived;
“but since, by disorders, are dead, as are those in the ‘Swallow.’ The
smiths are all dead; of the armourers, only John Speed and a boy
alive. Most other workmen dead or incapable. This is not remissness
of government, but the newcomers, dreaming of nothing but sack
and sugar-plums in India, are with much difficulty brought to
obedience.” A Dutch ship, the ‘Leyden’ arrived out in 1626, with loss
of 22 men, having been twelve months on the passage.
In the end of October, 1628, the ‘Morris’ reached the mouth of the
Channel from Bantam, “which was most happily met with near Scilly
by Captain Bickly, who was sent out to relieve any ship from the
Indies, she being in a very weak state by reason of an infectious
disease.” She reached the Downs safely with two other East
Indiamen; but having been driven from her anchors in a great
storm, was wrecked on the coast of Holland previous to November
19. Next year, about October 28, 1629, the ‘Mary’ of the East India
Company was reported to have put into Scilly having lost most of her
men by sickness. Therefore, Sir H. Mervyn, of H.M.S. ‘Lyon,’ in the
Downs, having got early word of the ‘Mary’s’ distress, writes to E.
Nicholas, to say that if the Company desire a convoy for the ‘Mary’
from their lordships of the Admiralty, “she being rich,” he (Mervyn)
hopes that Nicholas will remember him.
But, although it was not unusual for ships to come home with crews
weakened by scurvy, it was not invariable. The ‘William’ returned to
England in 1628, as rich a ship as the Company ever had from the
East Indies, with not a sick man in her, nor any dead on the way;
her lading was computed to be worth £170,000[1151].
In a despatch of February 6, 1626, Hawley gives an account of a
truly disastrous sickness in the factory and among the Company’s
ships at Batavia during the previous year, which illustrates another
risk than that of scurvy or flux, and an experience in the East Indies
not altogether exceptional[1152].
“On March 12, I dispeeded the ‘Diamond’ for Japan to fetch boards,
planks, etc. [to repair the ‘Bull’ with]; but hardly had fourteen days
passed when the ‘Bull’s’ men fell sick and died daily; then the
‘Reformation’s’ men died by five, six or more in a day; in a short
time the ‘Bull’s’ men all died but the master and one more, who
were dangerously sick, and in the ‘Reformation’ the master and all
the men lay at God’s mercy. We were forced to relieve them by
blacks, and hale the ships to the open bay [they would seem to have
been careened] where they rode like wrecks without other help than
some few to comfort their sick, for more from the other ships might
not be spared. The contagion was so pestilent that their blood, being
licked by dog or cat, caused them to swell, burst and die. It was
more moderate on shore, and was least on the ships in the open
bay, though they also were daily visited.... The ‘Diamond’ returned
on April 11, with planks etc.; also slaves and 44 Chinamen, which
were with no small charge procured, and who all fell sick, and 10 or
12 died.... Thinking the mortality was occasioned, not by pestiferous
air or soil, nor by any noxious tree, but by surfeit and the wet
monsoon, I enacted orders for government building, and cleansing
the trees to get more air. Wanted no provisions of fresh victual;
could at pleasure command neighbours to fish and fetch anything
needed, and the island itself furnished deer. On April 12, took
general view of all people, as follows:

English English Portuguese

in health sick sick
On shore 40 58 5
In the ‘Charles’ 32 10
" ‘Roebuck’ 16 2
" ‘Bull’ 2 8
" ‘Reformation’ 23 14 12
" ‘Abigail’ 8 3
" ‘Rose’ 7 2 5
128 97 22

—leaving, of course, an immense proportion dead.

These are instances from the records of the East India Company
during the first thirty years of its existence. It would be tedious,
even if it were practicable, to follow the history continuously. But
meanwhile to show that its experiences, good and bad, remained
much the same until long after, let us take two voyages in the year
1682. Governor William Hedges, passenger on board one of the
Company’s ships, enters in his diary the 25th of May, 1682, being
then off the Cape of Good Hope: “Not lost a man (except Mr
Richards) either by sickness or any other accident, since we left
England, which wants but three days of four months, and is just two
months since we passed the Equinoctial Line,” nothing being said of
sickness in the rest of the voyage. But another of the Company’s
ships the same year fared worse: “December 9, 1682, ship ‘Society’
arrived at Balasore. She left the Downs on May 30, and, not
touching at any place by the way, lost seventeen men of the
scurvy[1153].”
Sickness in the Colonizing of Virginia and New
England.
Leaving now the long voyages of the English beyond the Line, and
their factories in the East, let us see how they fared as regards
health when they merely crossed the Atlantic in their own latitudes.
The earliest series of voyages to Virginia, at Raleigh’s instigation,
from 1585 to 1590, have been already referred to. The continuous
history of Atlantic voyages, and of the North American colonies,
begins with the expedition of 1609 under Sir Thomas Gates and Sir
George Somers[1154].
Seven of the ships fitted out in the Thames, and sailed from
Woolwich on May 15, 1609. Having been joined at Plymouth by two
more, the fleet sailed thence on June 2, and from Falmouth on June
8. The expedition included “many unruly gallants, packed thither by
their friends to escape ill destinies,” with the proportion of women
and children usual among emigrants, as well as horses, and probably
other live stock. The navigation, to reach Western land in 37° N.,
appears to have been somewhat erratic:
“We ran a southerly course from the tropic of Cancer, where, having
the sun within six or seven degrees right over our head in July, we
bore away West; so that by the fervent heat and loomes breezes,
many of our men fell sick of the calenture”—Noah Webster takes
that to mean a spotted pestilential fever—“and out of two ships was
thrown overboard thirty-two persons. The vice-admiral [the
‘Diamond’] was said to have the plague in her; but in the ‘Blessing’
we had not any sick, albeit we had twenty women and children.”
A storm came on, in which the ships were scattered, the admiral’s
ship being driven to the Bermudas and there wrecked[1155]. In the
storm “some lost their masts, some had their sails blown from their
yards; the seas over-raking our ships, much of our provision was
spoiled, our fleet separated, and our men sick, and many died; and
in this miserable state we arrived at Virginia.” The ‘Blessing,’ on
board which was Gabriel Archer, the principal narrator of events,
seems to have fared better than the rest: “The ‘Unity’ was sore
distressed when she came up with us; for, of seventy landmen
[emigrants], she had not ten found, and all her seamen were down,
but only the master and his boy, with one poor sailor; but we
relieved them, and we four consorting, fell into the King’s River
[James River] haply the 11th of August.” They found the colony “all
in health (for the most part).” There were fourscore living 20 miles
from the Fort, who fed upon nothing but oysters eight weeks’ space.
“After our four ships had been in harbour a few days, came in the
vice-admiral, having cut her mainmast overboard, and had many of
her men very sick and weak.” This was the ship that was said to
have the plague in her. The admiral and his ship’s company, wrecked
on the Bermudas, fared in health best of all; the whole number of
150 persons reached Jamestown in due course, to find only 60
remaining alive of the 350 who had formed the complement of the
other ships. Part of the mortality had happened on board ship, but
probably the most of it after landing; Jamestown “is in a marish
ground, low, flat to the river, and hath no fresh water springs serving
the town, but what we drew from a well six or seven fathom deep,
fed by the brackish river oozing into it, from whence I verily believe
the chief causes have proceeded of many diseases and sicknesses
which have happened to our people, who are indeed strangely
afflicted with fluxes and agues.” Lord De La Warre, one of the early
governors, had a succession of illnesses—hot and violent ague,
followed by a relapse still more violent and lasting a month, “then
the flux surprised me and kept me many days,” then the cramp, with
strong pains, afterwards the gout, and finally the scurvy—which last,
however, might have been the eczema of gout, although it was said
to have been cured by the oranges and lemons of the Western
Islands, and by the voyage thither[1156].
Much in these early ventures was put down to climate, which was
really due to other causes. There are, of course, unhealthy climates;
but a great deal of the talk in the 17th and 18th centuries about the
“tainted air” of “foreign climes” was mere confusion of ideas. A more
correct view of events was that of the Governor and Council of
Virginia, in a letter of January 30, 1624, to the Virginia Company in
London:
“The mortality, which is imputed to the country alone, is chiefly
caused by the pestilent ships, which reach Virginia victualled with
musty bread and stinking beer, heretofore so earnestly complained
of.... Robert Benet in his lifetime boasted that the sale of four butts
of wine would clear a voyage. Rotten wines destroy their bodies and
empty their purses[1157].”
The letter then goes on to relate how sickness had brought down
great numbers “since their last.” According to Purchas, the
emigration to Virginia in three years immediately preceding this, the
years 1619, 1620 and 1621, had amounted to 3570 persons in 42
ships. Overcrowding, we may be sure, was the rule. We shall find
particular evidence of it in speaking of West Indian colonization in
the sequel; and for the present, it may suffice to quote a document
of April 24, 1638, a list of 110 passengers for New England per
‘Confidence’ of 200 tons.
If Virginia was settled by a crew of broken gallants and their
humbler followers, the New England colony was officered by strict
Puritans, who were accompanied by men and women sharing, as
nearly as might be, the same beliefs and principles of conduct. The
records of the Massachusetts Bay settlements might be expected,
therefore, to show less of sickness and failure than the Virginian;
and so, indeed, they do, although they are by no means clear of it.
The first voyage of the ‘Mayflower’ in 1620, carrying the small sect
of Brownists who had tried Holland for a time as a place of refuge,
presents nothing for our purpose. Like the settlers along the shores
of Chesapeake Bay before them, these first New Englanders had to
encounter famine and sickness. Famine appears to have been the
cause also of the disastrous epidemics among the Indians along the
whole coast from Cape Cod to Cape Charles, on two occasions, the
one previous to 1614 and the other in 1619[1158]. The emigration to
New England really began in 1630, and of one of the expeditions of
that year we have authentic particulars by the leader of it, John
Winthrop[1159]. On board the ‘Arbella,’ under date April 17, 1630, he
enters in his journal:
“This day our captain told me that our landmen were very nasty and
slovenly, and that the gun-deck, where they lodged, was so beastly
and noisome with their victuals and beastliness as would much
endanger the health of the ship. Hereupon, after prayer, we took
order, and appointed four men to see to it, and to keep that room
clean for three days, and then four others should succeed them, and
so forth on.”
Nothing more is said of the health on board the ‘Arbella.’ The
‘Mayflower’ and ‘Whale’ had their passengers all in health, but most
of their cattle and horses dead. The ‘Success’ lost — goats, and
many of her passengers were near starved. The ‘Talbot’ lost fourteen
passengers. The colony had various experiences of sickness in due
course. In 1633, smallpox proved fatal to whole settlements of
Indians: “the English came daily and ministered to them; and yet
few, only two families, took any infection by it[1160].” In 1646 an
epidemic of influenza went among the Indians, English, French and
Dutch, “not a family, nor but few persons, escaping it;” few died, not
above 40 or 50 in Massachusetts, and near as many at
Connecticut[1161]. In the spring of 1654, a general fast was
appointed by the government of Connecticut, one reason among
others being “the mortality which had been among the people of
Massachusetts.” In 1655 there was another influenza, in 1658 “great
sickness and mortality throughout New England,” in 1659 “cynanche
trachealis,” croup perhaps, and in 1662 again general sickness,
which, along with drought, called for a day of thanksgiving on their
cessation in October[1162]. It is beside the purpose to follow the
epidemics in America minutely; but before quitting the subject, the
following, from a Philadelphia letter of August 24, 1699, will suffice
to keep in mind the conditions of emigration which prevailed long
after the first voyages: “Arrived the ‘Britannia’ from Liverpool, which
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