Swedish books online

As a side note on the accessibility of Swedish texts, I have found that it's possible to download Swedish ebooks from Adlibris via Google Books/ My Library. For example, both of the titles mentioned in my previous post (Drabbad av renhet and Blandade kort) can be purchased this way for a very reasonable price in GBP. 

And of course, there is always the excellent Litteraturbanken. 

Google and the DOJ

The U.S. Justice Department has criticized the Google Book Settlement, saying that the proposals still present copyright and antitrust issues. In particular, it is concerned that the settlement in its current form forces authors

to "opt out" of having their books scanned and digitised, rather than opting in, which is the usual assumption for copyright law.  (Telegraph)

Google Books antitrust probe to go ahead

Google's $125,000,000 book-scanning settlement is to be investigated by U.S. antitrust legislators, according to Bloomberg. The Register reports that

deputy attorney general William F. Cavanaugh sent a letter to the federal judge overseeing the proposed settlement, saying that the deal may run afoul of US antitrust laws. "The United States has reviewed public comments expressing concern that aspects of the settlement agreement may violate the Sherman Act," Cavanaugh wrote.

At the centre of the probe will be the issue of the so-called "orphan works" - books whose rights are controlled by authors and publishers who have ceased to exist or cannot otherwise be located.

Herder and Hegel

Readers may like to note that 19th century German editions of the works of both Herder and Hegel can be accessed online - here and here. Of particular interest in relation to Nordic literature and its ideological antecedents, perhaps, are Herder's Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772), Selection from correspondence on Ossian and the songs of ancient peoples (1773), Of German Character and Art (with Goethe, 1773), Folk Songs (1778-79), and the dialogue Iduna (1796), in which the philosopher suggests that the Nordic gods may serve as the foundation of a new national German literature, replacing the myths and deities of Greek and Oriental antiquity.

The meaning of modern poetry

Although it's not quite complete, and presented in "Limited Preview" format, the digitized text of Steffen Hejlskov Larsen's Betydningsstrømme i nyere dansk poesi is available online as a Google Book. Larsen (b, 1931), whose studies and analyses of (mainly) Danish poetry first drew attention in 1965 with the seminal Om at læse moderne poesi, is one of the central voices in 20th century literary criticism as a whole, and his contribution to the understanding and development of modern literary aesthetics can be compared with that of figures like T.S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish and Jean Paulhan.

In Betydningsstrømme, Larsen follows the same channels of inquiry that run through his earlier work, with the emphasis on language and the "breaks" in language that characterize the articulation of modern poetry. The book is divided into parts - a theoretical one, in which the tension between "normal" and "broken" discourse is explored in terms of metaphor, symbol, "planes" and structures, and a practical one, with critical studies of actual works, including examples from collections by Ivan Malinowski, Klaus Rifbjerg, Jess Ørnsbo, Jørgen Gustava Brandt, Inger Christensen and Dan Turèll. There is a particularly illuminating section on the Danish poets of the 1980s who like Pia Tafdrup, Michael Strunge and Søren Ulrik Thomsen reacted against the politicized poetry of the 1970s and once again wrote "poems about love, death and life in general" - "POETRY could again be written in capital letters."

This is a book which deserves to be translated into English, for even though many of the examples Larsen discusses might be unfamiliar to a non-Danish reader, the critical direction of his thought is universal, carrying it far beyond the narrow interpretations of conventional academic study and literary-theoretical fashion.