Editorial preface
Ideas and notions concerning gender have become some of the most important literary themes of the early 21st century. Female and male authors have enthusiastically thrown themselves into a bona fide discovery of the possibilities offered by social gender and biological sex in terms of new ways of life, self-esteem, self-knowledge, and insights in a global world. Gender themes are employed in investigations of ideas and notions concerning the human condition, grieving, loss, attachments to the past, desire, and madness. A range of writers appear to be unconcerned with traditional notions of heterosexuality, homosexuality, and transgender issues, all the while attempting to outline a new sense of responsibility towards fellow human beings, children, and life on earth by questioning what gender – socially and existentially – may be and become.
Articles
What does it mean to fit into norms of gender and family? And what if one does not? And what does this have to do with literature? In 2025, ‘The History of Nordic Women’s Literature’ online launched a theme on queer literature in the Nordic countries.
In 2025 Denmark introduced a new literary canon for upper secondary education, due to come into effect in the 2026/27 school year. This revision followed two decades of criticism of the previous canon, in particular for its gender bias, but also for its lack of representation of large parts of the Danish Realm.
In many countries in seventeenth-century Europe, women were forbidden to dress like men, and in some it was criminal. Dekker and Van de Pool note that the prohibitions were unusually strict in Europe compared to other cultures.
A conversation between postdoc Lucie Duggan, PI of the Augustinus-funded research project Reading Women. Karen Brahe and Female Book Ownership (1609-1736), SDU, and Professor Anne-Marie Mai, editor of Nordic Women’s Literature, SDU, on Lucie Duggan’s research project.
Nordic Women’s Literature has moved to a new location at the University of Southern Denmark, which will host the work in the future. A group of researchers from the University of Southern Denmark will edit new material for the major site.
Nordic Women’s Literary History was published in five volumes in the period 1993 to 1998. In 2017, it was increased by a sixth volume on recent Nordic literature.
Around the 2000s, the personal, once again, became political and a new generation of female poets has since been addressing the globalized, mediarised reality through themes such as gender, identity and the body.Through their poetry, connections are created between intimate, bodily affairs and global issues such as war and climate change as well as questions surrounding white privilege and the traces of colonialism. Among today’s female poets are Mette Moestrup, Aase Berg, Ida Börjel and Gerður Kristný.
A distinct Nordic atmosphere is at the centre of many literary works written after 2000. Snow, silence, darkness and the contrast between a cramped home and nature’s expanse are common features of the linguistic investigation of a female space. This imagery unfolds in the novels and poetry collections of authors such as, Johanna Boholm, Merethe Lindstrøm, Rosa Liksom and Christina Hesselholdt.
After the millennium, globalization and the migration of women from economically unstable countries to the West became a theme in literature. The conception of a global sisterhood was challenged by the reality that many encounters with “other” foreign women were manifestly encounters between an employer and a domestic worker and thereby entailed a superior-inferior relationship. Reflections upon the unequal power relation between women from the Nordic region and their oppressed “sisters” is expressed through au-pair novels, literature about female refugees as well as docuseries and comic strips about the encounter with oppressed women from outside Europe. Examples of authors working with these issues in a literary context are Kirsten Hammann, Sara Kadefors Aasne Linnestå and Åsne Seiersted.
During the 2000s, the biographical and self-biographical narratives of the 1970s were replaced by new hybrid forms that operated in the space between fact and fiction. The genre was employed by both male and female authors, but the female authors in particular, were criticized for transgressing the private sphere in exhibitionist ways.Female exponents of autofiction are, amongst others, Maja Lundgren, Carina Rydberg, Suzanne Brøgger, Anne Lise Marstrand-Jørgensen and Herbjørg Wassmo.