Scandinavian Modernism: Stories of the Transnational and the Discontinuous

This article maps some of Scandinavian modernism' complexity in order to challenge the still relatively common equation of modernism with narrow formalist aesthetic experimentation. With respect to both periodization and geography, Scandinavian modernism can be seen as unusually long and expansive, and the approach here consequently emphasizes both discontinuity and transnationality; it also focuses on neglected issues of class and gender. Modernism in Scandinavia emerges both early and late, through starts and stops, in intermittent and localized forms, as well as in tension with ideologies of margin and center, import and export, and nation and cosmopolitanism.