Research Project on Swedish Literary Criticism
- Published: 3 June, 2025
Swedish literary criticism is a constant subject of debate. It is under threat in rural areas, where newspapers are shutting down their cultural coverage. Even in major cultural sections, criticism must compete with other types of content. At the same time, there is a lack of in-depth knowledge and understanding of the background to the current state of literary criticism.
In order to safeguard the cultural heritage that literary criticism represents and to increase knowledge about the field, the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation is planning the research project “The History of Swedish Literary Criticism”, led by Dr. Stina Otterberg Engdahl. dr. Stina Otterberg Engdahl.
“It feels incredibly exciting to be able to take a comprehensive approach to the history of criticism in Sweden,” says Stina Otterberg Engdahl. The fundamental idea behind this project is to highlight criticism in its own right—as an independent literary tradition. But also as the institution responsible for evaluation, judgment, and canonization of literature. It is in criticism that the qualified conversation about literature takes place.”
The preliminary timeframe for the project spans from 1880 to 1980. The reason for this scope is that the late 19th century marks the foundation of the modern mass society. During this period, a media-based public sphere was established, with a large number of newspapers and journals, steadily increasing book publishing, and eventually the emergence of radio and television.
“That hundred-year period is a coherent era in the sense that the printed newspaper was the dominant platform for criticism, even though radio was also important,” says Otterberg Engdahl.
This year, Stina Otterberg Engdahl is laying the groundwork for the research project. The main work on “The History of Swedish Literary Criticism” is expected to begin at the turn of the year 2025/26 and will continue for three years. Associate Professor Alexandra Borg (Uppsala) and Associate Professor Fredrik Hertzberg (Helsinki) are also expected to be part of the project group.
Stina Otterberg Engdahl holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, with criticism, essay writing, and poetry as her main areas of interest. She defended her dissertation “Clothed in Language: The Critic Olof Lagercrantz” (2010), for which she was awarded the prize of the Swedish Humanist Association and the Kurt Aspelin Scholarship. Her book “To Love, Drink, Sing, Live, Die: An Essay on Erik Axel Karlfeldt” (2014) earned her the Gothenburg City Essay Prize. She has previously worked as a senior lecturer in the Liberal Arts program at the University of Gothenburg, as an editor in the digitization project “Swedish Prose Fiction 1800–1900”, and as a member of the Swedish Arts Council’s working group for non-fiction. Otterberg Engdahl has written literary criticism since the 1990s and has been affiliated with Arbetarbladet, Bonniers Litterära Magasin, Svenska Dagbladet, and DN Kultur. She has also contributed criticism and essays to Litteraturbanken, Örnen och Kråkan, Respons, and Nordisk Tidskrift.
She has served as a member of the August Prize jury for fiction, the jury for DN’s critics’ prize, and was chair of the jury for the Karlfeldt Prize. Her most recent book is “The Works of Olof Lagercrantz 1951–1975: An Annotated Bibliography”(2023).