Útrásarvíkingar: The Literature of the Icelandic Financial Crisis (2008–2014) ...

• Main Author: Hall, Alaric
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Humanities Commons 2020
• Subjects: Icelandic literature; Medievalism; Fiction; Twenty-first century; Finance; Sociology; FOS Sociology; Iceland
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17613/15jy-xq63; https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:29615/

This book analyses novels in Icelandic that responded to the 2008 Crash. It affords a major case-study of how writers globally responded to the Financial Crisis, and one of the only monographs on contemporary Icelandic literature, providing a window for Anglophone readers into Iceland's current literary scene. Chapter 1 sketches the history of the Crash in Iceland, key concepts, and the book’s main themes. Chapter 2 focuses on the the crisis faced by post-War Western realism as it tried to address high finance and complex social interactions. It explores how one of the main responses to the Crash among younger Icelandic literary writers was pained self-examination. Chapter 3 charts Iceland's post-colonial anxiety about its status in the world, which is perhaps more prominent in Crash-fiction than the Crash itself. It focuses on the use and abuse of medieval and folkloric texts by current fiction-writers and charts changing identities in twenty-first century Iceland, particularly in relation ...