Scandinavian Cultural Radicalism

"Scandinavian Cultural Radicalism" explores the development of socialist literary theory and its various manifestations in the literature of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden over a period of two decades. The work examines the efforts of several leftist writers who used a collective novel technique (in which a relatively anonymous group of characters represented a -main character-) in an attempt to develop a working class culture. A history of the labor movement and the evolution of social democracies in Scandinavia precedes the analysis of specific collective novels, and argues that there is a strong correlation between the socioeconomic context and literary development of the 1930s."