Nordic Orientalism

This book explores the appropriation of Oriental imagery within Danish and Norwegian 19th century nation-building. The project queries Edward Said's binary notion of Orientalism and posits a more complex model describing how European counties on the periphery -- Denmark and Norway -- imported oriental imagery from France to position themselves, not against their colonial Other, but in relation to central European nations. Examining Nordic Orientalism across a century in the context of modernisation, urbanisation and democratisation the study furthermore shows how the Romanticists' naive treatment of the Orient was challenged by increased contact with the 'real' Orient.

...timely and of multiple interest [...] an ambitious and important contribution to the fields of Scandinavian literature and cultural studies dealing with nationalism and nation-building. It it higly recommended.- Marina Allemano, University of Alberta, Scandinavian Studies 79, Issue 1, Spring 2007, This is an intelligently conceived and elegantly written book that sets out to distinguish the ways in which Orientalism functioned in the common literary and cultural imagination shared by Denmark and Norway during the nineteenth century. [...] She (Oxfeldt) has offered a compelling argument regarding the changing status of Orientalism in the nineteenth-century literary tradition that Denmark and Norway share, and given an inspiring example of how analysis of popular cultural phenomena, such as entertainment parks, journalism, and world fairs, can enrich understanding of this literary tradition enormously.- Ellen Rees, University of Oregon, Scandinavica 46, no. 1, May 2007

Elisabeth Oxfeldt has worked in the position of Danish lecturer at the University of Oslo since 2002. She holds a Ph.D. in Scandinavian literature from University of California, Berkely.