Series A: Scandinavian Literary History and Criticism

1 primary work

Re-Writing the Script: Gender and Community in Elin Wagner

by Helena Forsas-Scott

Published 29 April 2009

Feminist, suffragist, pacifist and environmentalist, Elin Wagner was the author of a prodigious amount of journalism, political pamphlets and prose fiction as well as an acclaimed biography of Selma Lagerlof. She belonged to the circle of women who founded the radical weekly "Tidevarvet" ("The Epoch") and the unique Women Citizens' College at Fogelstad. This is the first full-length study in English of Wagner's output, and also the first attempt to go beyond the literary histories with their emphasis on the novels and short stories and include texts representing a wide range of genres. The focus on constructions of gender and community, which are studied in relation to dominant discourses, shows a number of Wagner's texts to be more radical than has been observed previously. Some of Wagner's texts are found to have outlined bold alternatives to the Swedish welfare state, and the combination of gender and environmentalism in some of the late texts anticipated much more recent ecocritical works.