Ellen Rees, Arizona State University
Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall 2001), 237-252
This essay begins by pointing out the glaring omission of experimental prose and women writers in histories of literary modernism in Scandinavia during the interwar years. Moreover, none of the most radical Scandinavian experimental prose by women has been translated into English. Taking up the cases of Swedish author Stina Aronson and Norwegian author Edith Øberg, the article explores the ways in which these writers undercut mainstream Scandinavian literary objectification of women and binarization of them as either intellectual or sensual, but never both. The essay examines further how these writers explicitly problematize the notion of female sexual frigidity in works that are highly self-reflective regarding their status as texts. The article traces the confluence of desire and writing in texts to the reformation of the European modernist canon. These Scandinavian women played a central and highly creative role in the cultural dialogue of modernism and, in particular, in conceptualizing and producing Scandinavian prose modernism.
