New Book on Swedish Working-class Fiction in Translation
Swedish working-class fiction from the 1930s has quite rightly been regarded as one of Sweden's most important contributions to world literature. Nowhere else has a single generation of self-taught writers with origins in the lower social classes had such a strong and long-lasting impact. But what happens once this literature travels outside of Sweden's borders? Does this literature have a life there?
Exporterad realism. Svensk arbetarlitteratur på engelska ("Realism on Export: Swedish Working-class Fiction in English Translation", Makadam, 2020) by Paul Tenngart shows how the so-called golden age in Swedish proletarian literature exists in the English-speaking world and presents a new model for how literary traffic across language and cultural boundaries can be studied. The study's conclusions also provide a new picture of the conditions that govern literary translations from smaller to larger languages.
You can read more about Paul Tenngart's work within our research programme here.