Nordic Research

Dr Mads Bunch

Dr Mads Bunch, Assistant Professor in Danish and Nordic Literature in the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, gave a lecture on Wednesday 18 February 2015.

Literature of the North Atlantic. Faroese and Icelandic Literature in a Scottish Context

Event details

Date: Wednesday 18 February, 2015, 5.30pm

Venue: Lecture Theatre G.03, 50 George Square

Biography

Dr Mads Bunch is an Assistant Professor in Danish and Nordic Literature in the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has done scholarly work on Kierkegaard, Ibsen, Strindberg, Blixen and Lars von Trier.

In 2009 he published the monograph Samtidsbilleder : realismen i yngre dansk litteratur 1994-2008 [Contemporary Images: Realism in Recent Danish Literature 1994-2008] about contemporary Danish literature. In 2013 he edited the book Millennium: Nye retninger i nordisk literatur [Millennium: New Directions in Nordic Literature] which covers and discusses the latest developments in Icelandic, Faroese, Finnish and Scandinavian Literature. He is currently co-writing a book about contemporary Danish autofiction.

Lecture abstract

The lecture explores the major developments in Icelandic and Faroese Literature in the 20th century focussing on the currents of modernism and magic realism and writers such as Halldór Laxness, Einar Már Guðmundsson, William Heinesen and Gunnar Hoydal.

The developments in Icelandic and Faroese literature will be framed within a Scottish context through comparison with the literature of the Orkneys, primarily the works of Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown.

The aim is to point out common regional experiences and similar/different artistic approaches and developments in the literatures of these North Atlantic areas. These have all been influenced by European and other global literatures, yet, in each their ways, kept their regional stamps.