Maria Lassén-Seger

Jouni Teittinen

Pia Maria Ahlbäck

The Nordic countries have long been subject to certain idealised, even utopian imaginaries, particularly with regard to images of pristine nature and the societal ideals of democracy, equality and education. On the other hand, such projections inevitably invite dissent, irony and intimations of the utopia’s dark underside. Things may yet take, or may have already taken, a dystopic course. The present volume offers twelve contributions on utopias and dystopias in Nordic literature and culture. Geographically, the articles cover the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, as well as the autonomous area of Greenland. Through the articles’ varied subjects — ranging from avant-garde literature and long poems to noir TV-series, young adult fiction, popular historiography, and political discourse in literature outside of Norden — the volume brings forth a historically rich, multi-layered picture of social, cultural and environmental imagination in the Nordic countries. Nordic Utopias and Dystopias is thus of interest not only to specialists in dystopian and utopian research but more broadly to scholars of literature and culture, and the political and social sciences, especially but not exclusively in the Nordic context.

From Aniara to Allatta!

Nordic Utopias and Dystopias

Saija Isomaa

Jyrki Korpua

This collection of essays examines various forms of dystopian fiction in literature, television, and digital games. It frames the timely trend of dystopian fiction as a thematic field that accommodates several genres from societal dystopia to apocalyptic narratives and climate fiction, many of them examining the hazards of science and technology to human societies and the ecosystem. These are genres of the Anthropocene par excellence, capturing the dilemmas of the human condition in the current, increasingly precarious epoch. The essays offer new interpretations of classical and contemporary works, including the canonised prose of Orwell, Atwood and Cormac McCarthy, modern pop culture classics like Battlestar Galactica, Fallout and Hunger Games, and the work of Johanna Sinisalo, a pioneer of Finnish speculative fiction. From Thomas Pynchon to Watership Down, the volume’s multifaceted approach offers fresh perspectives to those already familiar with existing research, but it is no less accessible for newcomers to the ever-expanding field of dystopian studies.

Jouni Teittinen

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