The Economy of National Feeling. Citizenship, Market, Biopolitics in Scandinavian nineteenth Century Novel

The significance of the Swedish nineteenth-century novel in the building of the nation and in the making of modern life is huge. It drew up borders to the country, made family life intimate and loving, inspired feelings for the homeland, expelled the foreign and the divergent, and made consumption a necessity for happiness. In short, the nineteenth-century novel helped to organise the population and to institute social order.

The Economy of National Feeling: Citizenship, Marketplace, and Biopolitics in Nineteenth-Century Scandinavian Literature project aims to show how literature – particularly the novel – quite literally not only made citizens but also organized life, pointing to how literature at the time formed part of a biopolitics. Instead of reading the novels as containers for ideas and ideologies, the project will look upon them as forms of writing practices through which a citizen subject is construed.

The project will display how novels, to produce reading citizens, had to stage social order in the form of an economy in which market relations prevailed. The citizen subject – whether the reader or a featured character – thereby gained traits of a homo economicus.

Situating nineteenth-century Swedish novels in their economic and political conditions of possibility defamiliarises present forms of nationalism and concepts of the nation, undermining the arguments of today’s nationalist movements.