I lecture and supervise students at all levels, often on literature and society.

In my doctoral thesis, Developing. Writing, Consumption and Sexuality in Karin Boye’s Astarte and Henry Parland’s To Pieces (2013), [Framkallning. Skrift, konsumtion och sexualitet i Karin Boye’s Astarte och Henry Parland’s Sönder] I study two modernistic novels, one from Sweden and one from Finland, in connection to their actuality – how the novels demonstrate themselves as examples on the contemporary and new. Focus is mainly threefold: how a logic of the commodity is permeating the texts, through which as an effect also gender and style are materialized; how new media such as amateur photographs and shop windows functions as aesthetic technologies for the novels and finally, how the novels themselves reflect on the way in which it is possible to represent this societal moment in history.

My current research within a Sabbatical project financed by The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) focuses on citizenship, economy and biopolitics in Scandinavian 19th century literature, mainly the novel: rather than reading novels as containers for ideas and ideologies, the project will look upon them as forms of writing practices through which a citizen subject is construed.

Within the project, “The Politics of Border”, I investigate power relations and spatiality in Nordic late 19th century fiction for girls and boys, through the prisms of postcolonial theory. 

 

Earlier projects:

Part of the research project Enchanting Nations: Commodity Market, Folklore and Nationalism in Scandinavian Literature 1830–1850, funded by The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond), which focuses on showing the significance of literature, particularly the novel, in spreading nationalism and the concept of the nation in early 19th century Scandinavia. My area of research connects nationalism and discourses on nation with economy: the commodity market, consumption and political economy of the time. To avoid reinstating nationalism on a methodological level, transnational articulations of national discourses are actualized.

Part of the research project Allegory, gender, society: functions and modes of writing in Swedish 20th century literature [Allegori, genus, samhälle: funktioner och skrivsätt i svensk 1900-talslitteratur], funded by Swedish Research Council [Vetenskapsrådet], prof. Ulf Olsson, 2000­–2004. My part in the project resulted in my doctoral thesis (see above).

 

Publications:

Articles in journals

”Sjukdomens gränsland. Studie av gränsen från två sidor i Torgny Lindgrens roman Hummelhonung” [Borderland of disease: analyses of the border from two directions in Torgny Lindgren’s Hummelhonung]. Samlaren. Tidskrift för forskning och litteratur, årg. 142, 2021, 140: 96–132 (Open Access) https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1643761/FULLTEXT01.pdf

 

“’To Die for King and Country’: Nationalism and the Citizen Subject from a Perspective of War in Three Poems in Runeberg’s Fänrik Ståls sägner”. Scandinavian Studies, Volume 93, Nr 2, Summer 2021, pp. 187–215 (Open Access)

https://doi.org/10.5406/scanstud.93.2.0187

 

“Writing Women on the Verge of Individualization. Citizen Subject, Consumption and Power in the 19th-Century Swedish Epistolary Novel”, NORA–Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 2021, Vol 29, No 1, 17–34 (Open access)

 https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2020.1825118

 

”Medborgarsubjektets ekonomi. Subjektivitet, biomakt och konsumtionsmönster i två tidiga 1800-talsromaner” [The economy of citizen subject. Subjectivity, bio power and patterns of consumption in two early 19^th century novels], Samlaren. Tidskrift för forskning och litteratur, 2019, 140: 57–80 (Open Access) https://svelitt.se/samlaren/2019

 

”Nationell kroppsekonomi. Statlig kontroll och produktivt begär i Emilie Flygare-Carléns Rosen på Tistelön” [National body economics. Governmental control and productive desire in Emilie Flygare-Carlén´s The rose of thistle island.], Edda, 2018, 105 (3): 203–218 (Open Access) doi:10.18261/ISSN.1500-1989-2018-03-03 https://www.idunn.no/edda/2018/03/nationell_kroppsekonomi

 

”Bygdeidyllens gotiska maskineri. Nationell identitet och fluktuerande bytesvärde i Fredrika Bremers I Dalarne. [The Country Life Novel’s gothic machinery. National identity and fluctuating exchange value in Fredrika Bremer’s Life in Dalecarlia]” Tidskrift för Litteraturvetenskap, (TFL), 2018, 3: 25–39 (Open Access) http://ojs.ub.gu.se/ojs/index.php/tfl/article/view/4562/3605

 

”Förförelsens ekonomi. Om konsumtion i Fredika Bremer’s Famillen H*** och Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s Araminta May” [An economy of seduction. On consumption in Fredrika Bremer’s Famillen H*** and Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s Araminta May], i Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, TFL, 2014, 3-4, 17–26 (Open Access) http://ojs.ub.gu.se/ojs/index.php/tfl/article/view/3229/2694

 

Book Chapters

2003: ”Spegelscen. Allegori och fotografi i Henry Parlands Sönder” [”Mirror Scene. Allegory and photography in Henry Parland’s To peaces”], in Allegori, estetik, politik. Texter om litteratur [Allegory, Aesthetics, Politics. Texts on Literature], edited by Ulf Olsson, Per Anders Wiktorsson. Stockholm/Stehag: Symposion, 2003

 

2001: ”Estetiskt våld. Edith Södergran, offret och den konstnärliga utsagan.” [“Aesthetic violence. Edith Södergran, sacrifice and the literary statement”] in Speglingar. Svensk 1900-talslitteratur i möte med biblisk tradition (Mirrror Images. Swedish 20th Century Literature Meets Biblical Tradition.), edited by Stefan Klint och Kari Syreeni, Skellefteå: Norma, 2001 

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• "To Die for King and Country": Nationalism and the Citizen Subject from a Perspective of War in Three Poems in Runeberg's Fänrik Ståls Sägner

  2021. Caroline Haux. Scandinavian Studies 93 (2), 187-215

  Article

  ‘“To Die for King and Country”: Nationalism and the Citizen Subject from a Perspective of War in Three Poems in Runeberg’s Fänrik Ståls sägner,’ adopts a transnational perspective in the analyses to show variations in power relations and point to a hybrid author position (Cohen 1997; Bhabha 1990). Yet, the article argues that the citizen is written in the context of war as a subject of patriotism in peacetime (Foucault 2008). Juxtaposed, the poems make visible ways in which the relation between private and collective, people and army, is regulated. This is how the poems expose ways of forming a ‘citizen subject’, which Ètienne Balibar (2016) claims is the foundation of modern subjectivity itself. 

  Read more about "To Die for King and Country"

• Writing women on the verge of individuality horizontal ellipsis Citizen subject, consumption and power in the nineteenth-century Swedish novel

  2021. Caroline Haux. NORA 29 (1), 17-34

  Article

  Three letter-writing nineteenth-century heroines lay out domestic worlds to their fictional readers in which moral sentiment and norms of citizenship versus individual desire are at stake. In an era of nascent capitalism and nation building, these are aspects of significance. But what role does writing letters play? And what impact do epistolary novels have on citizenship and gender at the time? With Michel Foucault and etienne Balibar as theoretical framework, this article discusses three epistolary novels-The Illusions (1836) by Sophie von Knorring in connection to Grannarne (1837) by Fredrika Bremer and Araminta May (1838) by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist-in order to discern how female writing produces the gendered citizen.

  Read more about Writing women on the verge of individuality horizontal ellipsis Citizen subject, consumption and power in the nineteenth-century Swedish novel

• Medborgarsubjektets ekonomi: Subjektivitet, biomakt och konsumtionsmönster i två tidiga 1800-talsromaner

  2019. Caroline Haux. Samlaren 140, 57-80

  Article

  It is not until the ordinary heroine Fransiska in Fredrika Bremer’s novel Grannarne [The Neighbours] has integrated into her new neighborhood that she can become a truly functional and self-governing individual. And it is only when the young customs officer Arve in Emilie Flygare-Carlén’s Rosen på Tistelön [The Rose of Thistle Island] gets involved in the welfare of the little coastal community that he lives up to his true potential as an autonomous and useful human being. The article discusses the way in which the individual in these novels is formed in a liberal economy. Subjectivation is looked upon from the perspective of Étienne Balibar, who equates the liberal subject with the citizen. Functioning dialectically both as subjugation and agency, subjectivation happens through collectivization.

  Read more about Medborgarsubjektets ekonomi

• Bygdeidyllens gotiska maskineri: Nationell identitet och fluktuerande bytesvärde i Fredrika Bremers I Dalarne

  2018. Caroline Haux. Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 48 (3), 25-38

  Article

  The Country Life Novel’s gothic machinery. National Identity and Fluctuating Exchange Value in Fredrika Bremer’s Life in Dalecarlia

  When Fredrika Bremer in her novel I Dalarne (1845) (Life in Dalecarlia) represents Falu copper mine as the horri c ruin of classic gothic tales: a vast and life-threatening void, the home of dreadful crimes and secret passions, this is paradoxically part of a nationalistic literary strategy. Simultaneously, though, the novel writes the nation as a pastoral on country life and mores of the peasantry. The article investigates how the gothic and the pastoral idyllic respectively establishes the nation and national identity on their separate terms and in relation to each other in accordance with their own particular inner logic.

  The idyllic streaks both manifests and problematizes local place as foundation for national identity, while the gothic exposes identity as arbitrary, and thereby subverts the notion of a citizen subject. This duality is linked to a market-based model of identity which the article argues is actualized by the novel itself. The condition of possibility is the emerging consumer society and the beginnings of industrialism, which the novel also thematises as tradition versus modernity. At stake in this eld of tension between the idyllic and the gothic stands the nation as a community of citizens: a collective subject. 

  Read more about Bygdeidyllens gotiska maskineri

• Nationell kroppsekonomi: Statlig kontroll och produktivt begär i Emilie Flygare-Carléns Rosen på Tistelön

  2018. Caroline Haux. Edda. Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning 105 (3), 203-217

  Article

  National Body Economics. Governmental Control and Productive Desire in Emilie Flygare Carléns The Rose of Tistelön

  When Emilie Flygare-Carlén writes about war between smugglers and customs officials in the archipelago off Bohuslän in the novel Rosen på Tistelön (1842), she also discusses the relationship between civil society and the state and thereby also citizenship and local identity. Rather than focusing on nationalism as ideology, which was actively promoted by authors and intellectuals at the time, my literary example reveals how the nationalist project in the novel presents itself in a way that is contradicted by its own inner logic. The study connects the commodity market with contemporary discourses on political economy. For us readers, these foreign goods recur on several levels in the text. The novel is examined as an event in a specific historical situation: how the novel itself answers the question about the historical moment it poses. Herein lies its actuality.

  Read more about Nationell kroppsekonomi

• Förförelsens ekonomi: Om konsumtion i Fredrika Bremers Famillen H*** och Carl Jonas Love Almqvists Araminta May

  2014. Caroline Haux. Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 44 (3-4), 17-27

  Article

  An Economy of Seduction: On Consumption in Fredrika Bremer’s Famillen H*** and Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s Araminta May.

  This article discusses consumption in Fredrika Bremer’s Famillen H*** (1830−31) and Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s Araminta May (1838), it is also considering the function of “seduction” in enticing a potential readership. Despite the differences between these two novels, this article argues that both are permeated by a commodity-logic, which manifests itself in the relation between seductive visibility (exchange value) and labour (use value). The bourgeois world of things made visible in the literary text is described as an effect of a fetishizing of the object due to commodification. In considering the texts in this way, this study also presents a new perspective on early realism. The article aims to show how the novels both speak of their economic “conditions of possibility”, where the fast growing literary market is one condition, and the way in which these novels seek to sell themselves on this market, by means of literary strategies. With a focus on “seduction” the central concern of this article is what literature does rather than what it means. 

  Read more about Förförelsens ekonomi

• Framkallning: Skrift, konsumtion och sexualitet i Karin Boyes Astarte och Henry Parlands Sönder

  2013. Caroline Haux.

  Thesis (Doc)

  This thesis is a comparative study in two novels which both try to understand modern life. The novels were both written between 1929 and 1930 as entries for the same major Nordic novel contest – Astarte in Sweden by Karin Boye, Sönder [To Pieces ]in Finland by the Finno-swedish author Henry Parland.

  This analysis tries to determine what is at stake in these novels by, apart from investigating them as novels in their own right, examining the complex interaction between a specific moment in history and the representation of that moment as literary text. The novels are examined as events in a specific historical situation; that is, how they write what is contemporary into themselves, trough answering the question about the historical moment that they themselves formulate. Four issues are fundamental to the study: The function of consumption and the commodity form in the novels. The way in which these novels render sexuality and desire. How other media forms function as aesthetic technologies for the novels. Lastly, aesthetics, writing and allegory: how the novels reflect on the possibility of representing this societal moment in history.

  A focus in the analysis is how woman is called forth as golden statue and photography, how she by letting herself be consumed as sexual symbol elicits male speech – thereby also making the speaker into author, and man. The economic side to this is the way in which men and women take on the form of commodities amongst themselves. It is in this sexual economy that they become men and women. The transformation of the sexed object into the systematic status of a sign, signifying its value, implies the simultaneous transformation of human relations into consumer relations: You consume or get consumed.

  Read more about Framkallning

Show all publications by Caroline Haux at Stockholm University