Centring on the peripheries - Bjarne Thorup Thomsen

Are the peripheries the new centre? How do the 'debatable lands' of Scandinavia and Scotland write their relations with their national centres, and with each other? Is the story of the margins just a figment of the metropole's imagination? How have postcolonialism and postnationalism made themselves felt in the literature of the cultural patchwork of Northern Europe? In these sixteen essays, Scandinavian and Scottish scholars trace ways to tell the stories of connections, boundaries and localities that might go undetected by historians and artists who see things from the perspective of the established centres. The literatures of the islands, borderlands and landscapes of the North and Baltic Seas are set in dialogue with contemporary literary and socio-political approaches to the study of local, national and global cultural constellations, disrupting conventional cartographies that paint the margins as passive victims of geography or economics. The essays demonstrate that relations between 'core' and 'periphery' are in constant flux, and that narratives of community, identity and history on the peripheries often do not aspire to the forms and kudos of core and canon.;"Centring on the Peripheries" opens up unexpected perspectives on cultural roots and on the routes between cultures, revealing surprising literary alliances and historical parallels. It will appeal to scholars of cultural identity, postcolonialism and European literature, and to readers who delight in exploring the borderlands of the literary canon.